Top 60 Henry Marsh Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “The operating is the easy part, you know,’ he said. ‘By my age you realize that the difficulties are all to do with the decision-making.”

— Henry Marsh

2. “Every surgeon carries within himself a small cemetery, where from time to time he goes to pray – a place of bitterness and regret, where he must look for an explanation for his failures.”

— Henry Marsh

3. “Anxiety might be contagious, but confidence is also contagious.”

— Henry Marsh

4. “Some of my operations are great triumphs and tremendous. But they’re only triumphs because there are also disasters.”

— Henry Marsh

5. “Informed consent’ sounds so easy in principle – the surgeon explains the balance of risks and benefits, and the calm and rational patient decides what he or she wants – just like going to the supermarket and choosing from the vast array of toothbrushes on offer. The reality is very different.”

— Henry Marsh

6. “But death is not always a bad outcome, you know, and a quick death can be better than a slow one.”

— Henry Marsh

7. “Starting on time, with everything just right, and the surgical drapes placed in exactly the right way, the instruments tidily laid out, is an important way of calming surgical stage fright.”

— Henry Marsh

8. “Doctors need to be held accountable, since power corrupts. There must be complaints procedures and litigation, commissions of enquiry, punishment and compensation. At the same time if you do not hide or deny any mistakes when things go wrong, and if your patients and their families know that you are distressed by whatever happened, you might, if you are lucky, receive the precious gift of forgiveness.”

— Henry Marsh

9. “Most medical students go through a brief period when they develop all manner of imaginary illnesses – I myself had leukaemia for at least four days – until they learn, as a matter of self-preservation, that illnesses happen to patients, not to doctors.”

— Henry Marsh

10. “And now all those brain cells are dead – and my mother – who in a sense was the complex electrochemical interaction of all these millions of neurons – is no more. In neuroscience it is called ‘the binding problem’ – the extraordinary fact, which nobody can even begin to explain, that mere brute matter can give rise to consciousness and sensation. I had such a strong sensation, as she lay dying, that some deeper, ‘real’ person was still there behind the death mask.”

— Henry Marsh

11. “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.”

— Henry Marsh

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

— Henry Marsh

13. “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.”

— Henry Marsh

14. “The eyes are said by poets to be the windows to the soul but they are also windows to the brain: examining the retina gives a good idea of the state of the brain as it is directly connected to it.”

— Henry Marsh

15. “Surgeons must always tell the truth but rarely, if ever, deprive patients of all hope. It can be very difficult to find the balance between optimism and realism.”

— Henry Marsh

16. “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.”

— Henry Marsh

17. “Life without hope is hopelessly difficult but at the end hope can so easily make fools of us all.”

— Henry Marsh

18. “It’s the professional shame that hurts the most,′ I said to him. I wheeled my bike as we walked along Fleet Street. ‘Vanity really. As a neurosurgeon you have to come to terms with ruining people’s lives and with making mistakes. But one still feels terrible about it and how much it will cost.”

— Henry Marsh

19. “We have been most successful, however, when our patients return to their homes and get on with their lives and never need to see us again. They are grateful, no doubt, but happy to put us and the horror of their illness behind them. Perhaps they never quite realized just how dangerous the operation had been and how lucky they were to have recovered so well. Whereas the surgeon, for a while, has known heaven, having come very close to hell.”

— Henry Marsh

20. “Psychological research has shown that the most reliable route to personal happiness is to make others happy. I have made many patients very happy with successful operations but there have been many terrible failures and most neurosurgeons’ lives are punctuated by periods of deep despair.”

— Henry Marsh

21. “But I then thought of how the value of my work as a doctor is measured solely in the value of other people’s lives, and that included the people in front of me in the check-out queue.”

— Henry Marsh

22. “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.”

— Henry Marsh

23. “The idea that my sucker is moving through thought itself, through emotion and reason, that memories, dreams and reflections should consist of jelly, is simply too strange to understand.”

— Henry Marsh

24. “I am reaching the end of my career this detachment has started to fade. I am less frightened by failure – I have come to accept it and feel less threatened by it and hopefully have learned from the mistakes I made in the past. I can dare to be a little less detached. Besides, with advancing age I can no longer deny that I am made of the same flesh and blood as my patients and that I am equally vulnerable.”

— Henry Marsh

25. “Angor animi – the sense of being in the act of dying, differing from the fear of death or the desire for death.”

— Henry Marsh

26. “I learned a long time ago in the outpatient clinic to make no distinction –as some condescending doctors still do –between ‘real’ or ‘psychological’ pain. All pain is produced in the brain, and the only way pain can vary, other than in its intensity, is how it is best treated, or more particularly in my clinic, whether surgery might help or not.”

— Henry Marsh

27. “We can make our own choices. We get to choose how we react to all that happens to us.”

— Henry Marsh

28. “If patients were thinking rationally they would ask their surgeon how many operations he or she has performed of the sort for which their consent is being sought, but in my experience this scarcely ever happens.”

— Henry Marsh

29. “We have achieved most as surgeons when our patients recover completely and forget us completely. All patients are immensely grateful at first after a successful operation but if the gratitude persists it usually means that they have not been cured of the underlying problem and that they fear that they may need us in the future. They feel that they must placate us, as though we were angry gods or at least the agents of an unpredictable fate.”

— Henry Marsh

30. “Hope is beyond price and the pharmaceutical companies, which are run by businessmen not altruists, price their products accordingly.”

— Henry Marsh

31. “When push comes to shove we can afford to lose an arm or a leg, but I am operating on peoples thoughts and feelings... and if something goes wrong I can destroy that persons character... forever.”

— Henry Marsh

32. “My readiness to admit to my fallibility is perhaps rather English, but I hope that the problems I describe will be familiar to doctors and patients everywhere.”

— Henry Marsh

33. “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.”

— Henry Marsh

34. “In America there are far more patients, and therefore more patients with such tumours. The patients are less deferential and trusting than they are in Britain. They are more like consumers than petitioners, so they are more likely to make sure that they are treated by an experienced surgeon.”

— Henry Marsh

35. “You might expect that seeing so much pain and suffering might help you keep your own difficulties in perspective but, alas, it does not.”

— Henry Marsh

36. “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.”

— Henry Marsh

37. “When I tell a patient that I think I should do their operation under local anaesthetic they usually look a little shocked. In fact the brain cannot itself feel pain since pain is a phenomenon produced within the brain.”

— Henry Marsh

38. “The corridors and rooms were starting to fill with unfamiliar faces and patients the size of small whales being wheeled past on trolleys.”

— Henry Marsh

39. “There is no evidence that the complete head shaves we did in the past, which made the patients look like convicts, had any effect on infection rates, which had been the ostensible reason for doing them. I suspect the real – albeit unconscious – reason was that dehumanizing the patients made it easier for the surgeons to operate.”

— Henry Marsh

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

— Henry Marsh

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

— Henry Marsh

42. “Anxious and angry relatives are a burden all doctors must bear, but having been one myself was an important part of my medical education.”

— Henry Marsh

43. “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.”

— Henry Marsh

44. “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.”

— Henry Marsh

45. “CSF used to be called “gin-clear” when there was no blood or infection in it,’ I say to Jeff. ‘But probably we’re now supposed to use alcohol-free terminology.’ I.”

— Henry Marsh

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

— Henry Marsh

47. “I could have a room to myself, with a carpet and with my own loo – details that are very important to patients but not to NHS administrators and architects. Nor, I am afraid to say, do many doctors care about these things, until they become patients and come to understand that patients in NHS hospitals rarely get peace, rest or quiet and never a good night’s sleep. I.”

— Henry Marsh

48. “Love, I reminded my trainees, can be very selfish.”

— Henry Marsh

49. “How are you feeling?’ I asked. ‘Fine,’ he replied with a tired smile. ‘Well done!’ I replied, as I think patients need to be congratulated for their surviving just as much as the surgeons should be congratulated for doing their job well. ‘It’s.”

— Henry Marsh

50. “To the man with a hammer, it is said, all things look like nails. When brain surgeons look at brain scans they see things that they think require surgery and I am, alas, no exception.”

— Henry Marsh