Quotes by Marsh, Henry.

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

“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.””

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

“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.””

“Thoreau the “Patron Saint of Swamps” because he enjoyed being in them and writing about them said, “my temple is the swamp… When I would recreate myself, I seek the darkest wood, the thickest and most impenetrable and to the citizen, most dismal, swamp. I enter a swamp as a sacred place, a sanctum sanctorum… I seemed to have reached a new world, so wild a place…far away from human society. What’s the need of visiting far-off mountains and bogs, if a half-hour’s walk will carry me into such wildness and novelty.””

“What I really hoped for, no doubt, was to come upon one of those lives which begin nowhere, which lead us through marshes and salt flats, trickling away, seemingly without plan, purpose or goal, and suddenly emerge, gushing like geysers, and never cease gushing, even in death.””

“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.””

“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.””

“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.””

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

“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.””

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

“Few people outside medicine realize that what tortures doctors most is uncertainty, rather than the fact they often deal with people who are suffering or who are about to die. It is easy enough to let somebody die if one knows beyond doubt that they cannot be saved - if one is a decent doctor one will be sympathetic, but the situation is clear. This is life, and we all have to die sooner or later. It is when I do not know for certain whether I can help or not, or should help or not, that things become so difficult.””

“We lauhed together for a long time. When wehad first met, her eyes were dull with pain-killing drugs and if shetried to talk, her face would controt with agonizing pain. I thoughthow radiantly beautiful she now looked. She stood up to leave and wentto the door but then came back and kissed me. `I hope I never see you again,' she said. `I quite understand,' I replied.””

“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.””