Henry Marsh Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2018, PB, 288pp, £8.99, 978-1474603874
I was in Waterstones perusing the books and spotted the paperback Admissions: A Life in Brain Surgery in a carefully laid-out pile. Despite a reluctance to pick up medical autobiographies I decided to read the opening paragraph. This was an error on my part because, after reading the first sentence, I was instantly hooked! Admissions is a wonderful title as it carries a double entendre: the obvious being patient stories but a description too of Marsh’s own personal foibles. Marsh worked as a consultant neurosurgeon in London hospitals for most of his career before becoming a celebrity doctor by writing his first book, the bestseller Do No Harm: Stories of Life, Death and Brain Surgery, and by featuring in award-winning documentary films Your Life in Their Hands and The English Surgeon. Here in this memoir he explores his medical life, which occurs both here in the NHS and in the Ukraine and Nepal. He is definitely a man who works with his hands, not only in surgery but also with a huge collection of professional handyman tools. The book follows his retirement from the NHS and the purchase of a dilapidated lock keeper’s cottage. He decides to divide his retirement time by renovating this cottage in England and by continuing to work abroad.
Marsh is an obsessional perfectionist who does not suffer fools gladly and resigns from the NHS in a fit of anger over inflexible intensive care guidelines, but not before squeezing the nose of a hapless intensive care nurse. It is the personal admissions that lift the book from simply being a collection of medical case histories or a description of different healthcare systems. In a way I felt I was being allowed to share his personal journey through his medical career. His icy detachment from the disasters that can befall neurosurgical cases and his way of dealing with his own ageing by running 25 miles a week resonated with me. Of course he hates doing the exercise but if it has the potential to ward off dementia he will continue to push his leaden and stiff body through its paces.
This book is best for those who are near or in retirement, as one can empathise with the situation the author is facing. He cannot stop working despite ethical concerns with operating in an impoverished Ukraine, or in Nepal operating on patients with misguided families and competitive avaricious neurosurgeons! In a way he probably cannot stop writing about his personal life and medical cases so I suspect further literary revelations will be forthcoming.
- © British Journal of General Practice 2019
