A review by thedoctorreads
Admissions: Life as a Brain Surgeon by Henry Marsh

4.0

‘Admissions’ begins with a startling admission—Henry Marsh shares the contents of his ‘suicide’ kit. This is the first of many, many such searing confessions from a surgeon nearing the end of his career. As the pages progress, you realize that his reasons for keeping the aforementioned kit are far from sentimental. Like a bear chewing off its leg when caught in a trap, Marsh would rather still the singing of his neuronal pathways while he still had the chance, rather than let their orchestral hum be distorted by disease or debilitation. Does that make him a bitter idealist? Or a heartbroken romantic?

“I have learnt that handling the brain tells you nothing about life - other than to be dismayed by its fragility.”

The book has a fractured narrative that takes places across decades, spanning continents—a chapter that beings in present day London winds back to his early days as a neurosurgeon in the NHS, another chapter that begins as an account of his day seeing patients at a camp in Nepal circles back to his schoolyears and the teacher who bullied him into learning swimming—much like the circuitous nature of memory itself, the present is never a moment to experienced, merely to be lived through the lens of either the past or the future. It is in this balance that so much of our life is spent that one can argue we never truly live, unless free of the burden of both.

“The only meaning of death is how I live my life now and what I will have to look back upon as I lie dying.”

There is an undercurrent of rage here, a blazing river coursing through the otherwise sedate narrative that circled back to one theme—raging against the dying of the light, rage against advancing old age upon a mind still clinging to its fiery youth. Like watching a battle-hardened wolf against the elements, you root for the wolf even as you rail against the inevitable toll that life extracts from all of us bound to the spokes of its ego crushing wheel.

“I suspect most surgeons understand too well the French surgeon Leriche’s remark that all of surgeons carry within ourselves an inner cemetery where the headstones for all the patients who have come to harm at our hands are to be found.”

This was a difficult memoir to read, more because the confessions here are wrought after a life spent trying to correct the mistakes that created them. It is humbling to know that even at our best and brightest, we are still liable to make mistakes. It is the essential contradiction that lies at the heart of practicing medicine.