The SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLING, award-winning and candid insight into the life and work of a modern neurosurgeon - its triumphs and disasters. 'An astonishing glimpse into this stressful career' INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY
'A SUPERB ACHIEVEMENT' IAN MCEWAN
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What is it like to be a brain surgeon?
How does it feel to hold someone's life in your hands, to cut through the stuff that creates thought, feeling and reason?
How do you live with the consequences when it all goes wrong?
DO NO HARM offers an unforgettable insight into the highs and lows of a life dedicated to operating on the human brain, in all its exquisite complexity. With astonishing candour and compassion, Henry Marsh reveals the exhilarating drama of surgery, the chaos and confusion of a busy modern hospital, and above all the need for hope when faced with life's most agonising decisions.
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Winner:
PEN Ackerley Prize
South Bank Sky Arts Award for Literature
Shortlisted:
Costa Biography Award
Duff Cooper Prize
Wellcome Book Prize
Guardian First Book Award
Slightly Foxed Best First Biography Prize
Longlisted:
Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction
A fascinating look inside the head of a man whose job it is to fiddle around in ours. He acknowledges that surgeons are arrogant, that they play God, but that they are also afflicted by despair, sorrow and doubt. He is scathing on NHS bureaucracy and his picture of doctors doing their best but basically flailing in the dark made me respect the profession more
