Quotes from Henry Marsh

CSF used to be called "gin-clear" when there was no blood or infection in it,' I say to Jeff. 'But probably we're now supposed to use alcohol-free terminology.' I

You might think the operation has been a success because the patient leaves the hospital alive but if you saw them years later – as I often do – you would realize that the result of the operation was a human disaster.

The best is the enemy of the good,

I could have a room to myself, with a carpet and with my own loo – details that are very important to patients but not to NHS administrators and architects. Nor, I am afraid to say, do many doctors care about these things, until they become patients and come to understand that patients in NHS hospitals rarely get peace, rest or quiet and never a good night's sleep. I

the French surgeon René Leriche observed, we all carry cemeteries within ourselves.

How are you feeling?' I asked. 'Fine,' he replied with a tired smile. 'Well done!' I replied, as I think patients need to be congratulated for their surviving just as much as the surgeons should be congratulated for doing their job well. 'It's

We lauhed 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.

Daniel Kahneman's book Thinking, Fast and Slow,

Cavalier King Charles spaniels, we learnt, often suffer from the brain abnormality known as a Chiari malformation, which humans also get. Labradors can develop malignant meningiomas. The spaniels' problem is the result of selective breeding aimed to produce the small round head which wins points at dog shows. The malformation leads to spinal cord damage, and the poor creatures suffer from intractable pain and scratch themselves incessantly.

My 'I', my conscious self, writing these words, does not feel like electrochemistry, but that is what it is.

Se dice con frecuencia que más vale partir demasiado pronto que demasiado tarde, ya se trate de una carrera profesional, de una fiesta o de la vida misma.

Es el cirujano quien carga con toda la responsabilidad, pese a toda la cháchara sobre la cultura libre de culpa.

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

And yet it has been estimated that in the developed world, 75 per cent of our lifetime medical costs are incurred in the last six months of our lives. This is the price of hope, hope which, by the laws of probability, is so often unrealistic. And thus we often end up inflicting both great suffering on ourselves and unsustainable expense on society.

I' am a transient electrochemical dance, made of myriad bits of information; and information, as the physicists tell us, is physical.

But it seems to me now that it no longer matters if I never finish. I will try not to wait for the end, but I hope to be ready to leave, booted and spurred, when it comes. It is enough that I am well for a little longer, that I have been lucky to be part of a family – past, present and future – that I can still be useful, that there is still work to be done.

Few – if any – of these patients would survive or emerge unscathed from whatever it was that had damaged their brains.

He was transferred on a Friday afternoon – never a good time to fall seriously ill

the government's so-called 'market-driven reforms' of the NHS seemed to be driving the NHS even further away from what went on in the real market of the private sector, in which I was once again a patient.

It has never seemed a problem to me, only a source of awe, amazement and profound surprise that my consciousness, my very sense of self which feels as free as air, which was trying to read the book but instead was watching the clouds through the high windows, the self which is now writing these words, is in fact the electrochemical chatter of one hundred billion nerve cells.

sometimes, if you are to make the right decisions, you have to accept that you might be wrong.

Life, by its very nature, is reluctant to end. It is as though we are hardwired for hope, to always feel that we have a future.

First, do no harm . . .' Commonly attributed to Hippokrates of Kos, c. 460 BC '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.' René Leriche, La philosophie de la chirurgie, 1951

Los neurocirujanos dicen a veces que operar un aneurisma se parece a la tarea de desactivar una bomba, aunque se requiere una valentía de otra clase y es la vida del paciente la que está en juego, no la del médico.