Henry Marsh

Desert Island Discs

BBC

Society & Culture, Music Commentary, Music, Personal Journals

4.4 • 13.7K Ratings

🗓️ 23 September 2018

⏱️ 36 minutes

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Summary

Henry Marsh is a neurosurgeon, who pioneered a technique of operating on the brain while the patient is under local anaesthetic. The procedure is now standard practice. He is also an acclaimed writer. He was born in 1950 in Oxford, where his father was an academic. His mother came to England as a political refugee from Nazi Germany in the late 1930s. Henry did not initially pursue a career in medicine: after dropping out of university, he found work as a hospital porter, and only then decided to train as a doctor. He was appointed a consultant at St George’s Hospital, London, in 1987. He has spent his career in the NHS, and has also frequently worked abroad, in Ukraine, Nepal, Albania and elsewhere. He retired in 2015, but continues to teach one day a week and to work overseas to help less experienced surgeons. In 2014, he published a memoir, Do No Harm, which was widely praised for its honesty about mistakes in the operating theatre. Presenter: Kirsty Young Producer: Sarah Taylor

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is the BBC.
0:03.0	Hello, I'm Kristi Young.
0:05.0	Welcome to Desert Island Discs, where every week I ask my guests to choose the eight tracks, the book and the luxury item
0:12.0	that they'd want to take with them if they were cast away on a desert island.
0:16.0	For rights reasons, the music on these podcast versions is shorter than in the original broadcast.
0:22.0	You can find over 2,000 more editions to listen to and download on the Desert Island Discs website.
0:30.0	Music
0:49.0	My castaway today is the neurosurgeon, Henry Marsh.
0:53.0	In his decades dedicated to saving people's brains from the ravages of disease and injury,
0:58.0	he has surely worked in the most select and intimate area of medicine,
1:03.0	applying his craft and doing his best to balance detachment with compassion and hope with realism.
1:09.0	What he describes as the fierce and happy concentration of his work came to wider attention
1:15.0	through his compelling best-selling memoir, Duno Harm,
1:18.0	where along with his considerable accomplishments,
1:21.0	the anxieties and tragedies of his high-flying career were laid starkly bare.
1:27.0	He may well be the only eminent neurosurgeon who has also spent time working as a hospital porter,
1:33.0	and it was that stint as a young man lifting and laying patients and swapping down walls and equipment
1:39.0	that exposed him to what he describes as the controlled and altruistic violence of the operating theatre from there on in,
1:46.0	he was pretty much hooked.
1:48.0	He says,
1:49.0	A brain surgeon's life is never boring and can be profoundly rewarding, but it comes at a price.
1:55.0	You will inevitably make mistakes and you must learn to live with the occasionally awful consequences.
	...

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