Recently I met a fantastic person. His name is Henry Marsh, and he is one of the most prominent neurosurgeons in the United Kingdom. Luckily for me, I didn’t have a chance to meet him in person. I met him through the book ‘Do No Harm: Stories of Life, Death and Brain Surgery.’
This book stole my sleep, but I don’t regret it. Through practice, Dr. Marsh built quite an impressive philosophy. I dived into the world of precision, where there is no right for a mistake. But you still make them (because no human is an exception) and you pay the price by leaving a young mom waking up from anesthesia paralyzed for the rest of her life… But you also save hundreds of lives. Some patients call you God, some - a murderer. Dr. Marsh says that every neurosurgeon carries a small cemetery inside. From time to time he goes there to pray and to find the reasons for his failures.
Unimaginable, how consciously one person can choose to dedicate so many years to education and hard work for then carrying a cemetery inside? But I guess it is worth if you also save lives.
Each chapter of the book tells about one brain disease, one patient, one surgery and how it affected Dr. Marsh’s world. He took every case personally. He dedicates the book to his wife Kate, saying that he wouldn’t have achieved that much without her by his side.
I want to share one quote to which I kept coming back while reading the book…
“Neuroscience tells us that it is highly improbable that we have souls, as everything we think and feel is no more or no less than the electrochemical chatter of our nerve cells. Our sense of self, our feelings and our thoughts, our love for others, our hopes and ambitions, our hates and fears all die when our brains die. Many people deeply resent this view of things, which not only deprives us of life after death but also seems to downgrade thought to mere electrochemistry and reduces us to mere automata, to machines. Such people are profoundly mistaken since what it does is upgrade matter into something infinitely mysterious that we do not understand. There are one hundred billion nerve cells in our brains. Does each one have a fragment of consciousness within it? How many nerve cells do we require to be conscious or to feel pain? Or does consciousness and thought reside in the electrochemical impulses that join these billions of cells together? Is a snail aware? Does it feel pain when you crush it underfoot? Nobody knows.”
At first, I was appalled: how dare he say that there is no soul?! He ruins all the religions at once. But then I realized he goes deeper. Our connection with something higher than us is not in invisible 21 grams, it is in our essence, in our every cell. The light is in all the hundred billion nerve cells. This concept is beautiful! I had no idea that my body could fit in a hundred billion of anything. But apparently it can, and each can feel. Now I feel like a miracle! And I love this concept!
Overall, the book is a great read. It is well-written by a highly-intellectual carrying unique knowledge doctor, who also has a beautiful soul. In addition to it, by reading this book, you will learn a lot about the brain.
A little piece of advice: do NOT start searching for the symptoms of each brain disease described in the book.
Other than that, enjoy!
Here is a link to Amazon (probably, it is the best way to spend 5$ :)
https://www.amazon.com/Do-No-Harm-Stories-Surgery/dp/125009013X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1521093790&sr=8-1&keywords=do+no+harm
