Quotes from Henry Marsh

Anxious and angry relatives are a burden all doctors must bear, but having been one myself was an important part of my medical education.

The idea that my sucker is moving through thought itself, through emotion and reason, that memories, dreams and reflections should consist of jelly, is simply too strange to understand.

It's the professional shame that hurts the most,' I said to him. I wheeled my bike as we walked along Fleet Street. 'Vanity really. As a neurosurgeon you have to come to terms with ruining people's lives and with making mistakes. But one still feels terrible about it and how much it will cost.

We laughed together for a long time. When we had first met, her eyes were dull with pain-killing drugs and if she tried to talk, her face would contort with agonizing pain. I thought how radiantly beautiful she now looked. She stood up to leave and went to the door but then came back and kissed me. `I hope I never see you again,' she said. `I quite understand,' I replied.

Every surgeon carries within himself a small cemetery, where from time to time he goes to pray – a place of bitterness and regret, where he must look for an explanation for his failures.

Psychologists talk of the 'endowment effect' – that we are more concerned about losing things than gaining them. Once we own something, we are averse to losing it, even if we are offered something of greater value in exchange.

Love, I reminded my trainees, can be very selfish.

My readiness to admit to my fallibility is perhaps rather English, but I hope that the problems I describe will be familiar to doctors and patients everywhere.

Starting on time, with everything just right, and the surgical drapes placed in exactly the right way, the instruments tidily laid out, is an important way of calming surgical stage fright.

We can make our own choices. We get to choose how we react to all that happens to us.

In America there are far more patients, and therefore more patients with such tumours. The patients are less deferential and trusting than they are in Britain. They are more like consumers than petitioners, so they are more likely to make sure that they are treated by an experienced surgeon.

The corridors and rooms were starting to fill with unfamiliar faces and patients the size of small whales being wheeled past on trolleys.

The eyes are said by poets to be the windows to the soul but they are also windows to the brain: examining the retina gives a good idea of the state of the brain as it is directly connected to it.

I am reaching the end of my career this detachment has started to fade. I am less frightened by failure – I have come to accept it and feel less threatened by it and hopefully have learned from the mistakes I made in the past. I can dare to be a little less detached. Besides, with advancing age I can no longer deny that I am made of the same flesh and blood as my patients and that I am equally vulnerable.

It is often said that it is better to leave too early rather than too late, whether it is your professional career, a party, or life itself.

The famous sea squirt, beloved of popular neuroscience lectures, in its larval stage is motile and has a primitive nervous system (called a notochord) so it can navigate the sea – at least, its own very small corner of it. In its adult stage it fastens limpet-like to a rock and feeds passively, simply depending on the influx of seawater through its tubes. It then reabsorbs its nervous system – it is no longer needed since the creature no longer needs to move.

La vida sin esperanzas es tremendamente difícil, pero con cuánta facilidad consigue la esperanza, en definitiva, volvernos necios a todos.

To the man with a hammer, it is said, all things look like nails. When brain surgeons look at brain scans they see things that they think require surgery and I am, alas, no exception.

He has been the subject of two major documentary films, Your Life in Their Hands, which won the Royal Television Society Gold Medal, and The English Surgeon, which won an Emmy,

All the world wants to help Nepal and vast sums of aid have been lavished on the country, yet much of it seems to have disappeared without trace, leaving only faded signs and notice-boards behind.

It used to be called angor animi – the anguish of the soul – the feeling that some people have, when they are having a heart attack, that they are about to die. Even now, more than thirty years later, I can see very clearly the dying man's despairing expression as he looked at me as I turned away.

La neurociencia nos dice que es altamente improbable que tengamos alma, pues cuanto pensamos y sentimos no es ni más ni menos que el parloteo electroquímico de nuestras neuronas. Nuestro sentido de la identidad, nuestros sentimientos y pensamientos, el amor que mostramos a los demás, nuestras esperanzas y ambiciones, nuestros odios y temores, todo eso muere cuando el cerebro muere.

Next morning I showed her brain scan to the juniors at

Just as it is irresistible to save a life, it is also very difficult to tell somebody that I cannot save them