Confessions Of A Brain Surgeon (BBC2)
What’s the difference between a bus driver and a brain surgeon? None at all, it turns out, if Henry Marsh is typical.
Henry is a retired neurosurgeon who spends much of his free time in Ukraine, a country he loves, helping out in the operating theatre at Lviv hospital. Sometimes, when the senior medic needs a tea break, he steps in for a spot of impromptu brain surgery.
That’s very like the driver of a horse-drawn Victorian omnibus who, legend has it, spent his days off riding buses driven by his mates… having a ‘busman’s holiday’.
Henry was the subject of an idiosyncratic hour-long biography, Confessions Of A Brain Surgeon.
There was no particular reason for the film — no news angle or ‘peg’, as journalists call it. He hasn’t reached a landmark birthday, and he isn’t receiving a knighthood, though he probably deserves one.
It’s simply that the film-makers, Harriet Bird and Charlie Russell, seemed fascinated by his personality and his achievements. He is certainly flamboyant, the sort of man who, when asked to say something for a sound check, recites a Shakespearean sonnet.
Neurosurgery, he says, is ‘bomb disposal work for cowards’, because though snipping out a tumour is a high-risk procedure, brains don’t explode.
But he’s also a depressive, shattered by a brush with his own mortality after a bout of prostate cancer — though thankfully he’s currently in remission. And, aged 75, he is haunted by memories of the patients he could not save and brain ops that went wrong.
Henry was the subject of an idiosyncratic hour-long biography, Confessions Of A Brain Suregeon
Henry is a retired neurosurgeon who spends much of his free time in Ukraine, a country he loves, helping out in the operating theatre at Lviv hospital
He referred five times to his ‘inner cemetery, a place full of bitterness and regrets… I look back and there’s this overwhelming sense of failure’.
As if to torment himself, he invited the cameras to join him as he sat down with Tina, the mother of a boy called Max who died after a brain operation went wrong, 29 years ago. Tina admitted she couldn’t help blaming Henry, even hating him, because he’d been unable to save her son. ‘We put all our faith in him,’ she said. ‘We were told he was the best in the world.’
The grief in her voice was edged with anger. Little wonder that Henry is traumatised by the surgeries that did not succeed. Under the weight of such criticism, most people would have no self-confidence left at all.
He’s plainly fortunate to have a strong support network of family and friends around him, including his former anaesthetist Judith Dinsmore, who helped him to develop the revolutionary technique of ‘awake craniotomy’ — brain surgery on a conscious patient.
How it is possible for a person to lie still and talk after the top of their skull has been sawn off, this documentary did not explain.
Little was said either about why, though he and his second wife Kate are apparently happily married, he lives in London while she lives in Oxford. Perhaps that is the secret of their success.
