Henry Marsh Admissions Quotes

The only meaning of death is how I live my life now and what I will have to look back upon as I lie dying.

Psychologists talk of the ‘endowment effect’ – that we are more concerned about losing things than gaining them. Once we own something, we are averse to losing it, even if we are offered something of greater value in exchange.

It is often said that it is better to leave too early rather than too late, whether it is your professional career, a party, or life itself.

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

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

I am starting all over again, I said to myself once more, but am running out of time.

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

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

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

So what was better? To die within the next few years, or face a longer life of awful disability?

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.

wish I were a sea squirt, If life became a strain, I’d veg out on the nearest rock And reabsorb my brain.

He has been the subject of two major documentary films, Your Life in Their Hands, which won the Royal Television Society Gold Medal, and The English Surgeon, which won an Emmy,

All the world wants to help Nepal and vast sums of aid have been lavished on the country, yet much of it seems to have disappeared without trace, leaving only faded signs and notice-boards behind.

For those who believe in an afterlife, must we suffer as we lie dying, if we are to earn our place in heaven? Must the soul undergo a painful birth if it is to survive the body’s death, and then ascend to heaven? Is it yet more magic and bargaining – if we suffer now, we will not suffer in the future? We will not go to hell or linger as unhappy ghosts? Is it cheating, to have a quick and easy death? But I do not believe in an afterlife – my concern is simply to achieve a good death. When the time comes, I want to get it over with. I do not want it to be some prolonged and unpleasant experience, presided over by terminal-care professionals, who derive their own sense of meaning and purpose from my suffering. The only meaning of death is how I live my life now and what I will have to look back upon as I lie dying.

Our fear of death is deeply ingrained. It has been said that our knowledge of our mortality is what distinguishes us from other animals, and is the motive force behind almost all human action and achievement.

The famous sea squirt, beloved of popular neuroscience lectures, in its larval stage is motile and has a primitive nervous system (called a notochord) so it can navigate the sea – at least, its own very small corner of it. In its adult stage it fastens limpet-like to a rock and feeds passively, simply depending on the influx of seawater through its tubes. It then reabsorbs its nervous system – it is no longer needed since the creature no longer needs to move.

My subsequent life as a neurosurgeon was to teach me that the distinction between physical and psychological illness is false – at least, that illnesses of the mind are no less real than those of the body, and no less deserving of our help.

The humourless men seated round the table before me were part of the great industry of personal injury compensation, with its army of suave and accomplished lawyers and assured expert witnesses, rooting in a great trough of insurance premiums.

Blood flashes through the brain in a matter of seconds, one quarter of all the blood from the heart, darkening as the brain takes the oxygen out of it. Thinking, perceiving and feeling, and the control of our bodies, most of it unconscious, are energy-intensive processes fuelled by oxygen.

...as I read it [magazine with gloomy predictions about what was going to happen to the planet], I wondered whether becoming a doctor, healing myself by healing others, might not be a little self-indulgent. There might be more important ways of trying to make the world a better place - admittedly less glamorous ones - than by being a surgeon. I have never entirely escaped the view that being a doctor is something of a moral luxury, by which doctors are easily corrupted. We can so easily end up complacent and self-important, feeling ourselves to be more important than our patients.

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.

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.

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.

The efficiency of the hospital was a perfect illustration of Dunbar’s number – that magic number of 150. The size of our brain, Robin Dunbar, an eminent evolutionary anthropologist at Oxford University, has argued (and the brain size of other primates), is determined by the size of our ‘natural’ social group, when humans and their brains evolved in small hunting and gathering groups. We have the largest brains among primates, and the largest social group. We can relate to about 150 people on an informal, personal basis, but beyond that leadership, impersonal rules and job descriptions become necessary. So

It was miserable work, with little reward, and I learned much about the limitations of human kindness, and in particular my own.

I wish I were a sea squirt, If life became a strain, I’d veg out on the nearest rock And reabsorb my brain.