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Henry Marsh

Neurosurgeon and writer

United Kingdom · b. 1950

British neurosurgeon, for three decades a consultant at St George's Hospital in London, and the author of Do No Harm, Admissions and And Finally. Diagnosed with advanced prostate cancer in early 2020, with a seventy-five per cent probability of recurrence within five years, he wrote And Finally (2022) about crossing over from doctor to patient. He remained alive and in remission at the time of this pass, which makes him the least terminal of the six people here.

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Question When was the last time you changed your mind about something? Change of mind read 26 other answers →
When I now think of how the uncertainty about my own future, and the proximity of death, threw me into torment, careering wildly between hope and despair, I look back in wonder at how little I thought about the effect I had on my own patients after I had spoken to them. I did worry that if my tone of voice was too pessimistic the poor patient might spend what little time they had left feeling deeply depressed, simply waiting to die. So I tried to find a balance between telling them the truth and not depriving them of hope. After a patient died, I only occasionally heard back from the family, so I had little way of knowing whether the way I had spoken to them was appropriate or not.

Recorded Edited extract from And Finally: Matters of Life and Death, published by Vintage, The Guardian, 13 August 2022 source ↗

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