Henry Marsh read Politics, Philosophy and Economics at Oxford University before studying medicine at the Royal Free Hospital in London. He became a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons in 1984 and was appointed Consultant Neurosurgeon at Atkinson Morley's/St.George's in 1987. He has been the subject of two major documentary films: Your Life in their Hands (BBC, 2003) which won the Royal Television Society Gold Medal and The English Surgeon which won an Emmy. He was also made a CBE by HM the Queen in 2010.
Do No Harm (2014) is a powerful and gripping memoir which reveals what it is to play god in the face of the life-and-death decisions a neurosurgeon encounters daily. Clever, shocking and brutally candid, Henry Marsh never shirks the difficult questions be they moral, philosophical, ethical or emotional. Above all this is a book about the moving personal dilemmas that lie behind every operation he performs, and his encounters with patients whose lives are balanced on a knife's edge.
His book Admissions (2017) reflects upon what forty years spent handling the human brain has taught Henry. He explores the difficulties of a profession that deals in probabilities rather than certainties, and where the overwhelming urge to prolong life can come at a tragic cost for both patients and for those who love them. In this searing, provocative, and deeply personal memoir Henry, moving between encounters with patients in his London hospital to those he treats in the more extreme circumstances of his work in Nepal and Ukraine, faces up to the overwhelming burden of responsibility that can come with trying to reduce human suffering and develops a fresh understanding of what matters to us all in the end.
He has recently published his brand new book, And Finally (2022). Elegiac, candid, luminous and poignant, this memoir is ultimately not so much a book about death, but a book about life and what matters in the end. 'Facing his own mortality, Marsh has written a vividly wry and honest book' The Times