Book 2 - Do No Harm - Stories of Life, Death and Brain Surgery by Henry Marsh.
It takes a particular kind of person to want to be a surgeon, especially a neurosurgeon. Reading this book has left me in awe of the work of Henry Marsh, and all other surgeons. I know I couldn't have done it.
He writes with extreme candour, not shying away from the times when he has operated on a patient and it has not been a success. He tells of many incidences of failure in his book. Neurosurgery is obviously, by its nature, one which is fraught with huge risk of failure - leaving a patient disabled, or dead is quite possible. He admits he doesn't always know when to operate and when merely to allow nature to take its course. He has made mistakes which have led to the NHS Trust, for whom he works, being sued. He has caused catastrophic life-altering injuries to patients on the operating table. He admits this. Surgeons are human, they are prone to error and when it goes wrong it can be disastrous for everyone concerned.
This book covers many types of cases he has come across throughout his working life, the successes, the failures, the frustrations of working within the NHS, bound by government guidelines and working practices, the difficulties of training new surgeons and so on.
I got the impression that he felt his most rewarding work has been that done in Ukraine, helping people who felt he was their only chance. I watched the documentary The English Surgeon part way through reading this book, and it helped me to visualise that work and also to see some of the people mentioned in this book.
We often imbue surgeons, and doctors, with superhuman powers - believing that they can cure everyone and everything, that they are miracle-workers. This book, sometimes brutally, debunks that myth. They can only do what is possible.
If I had to have a criticism of this book, it is that it is quite heavy on the failures "this operation went wrong and the patient died or was left in a severely disabled state". I understand that neurosurgery is dangerous and that many people who come to the operating table are beyond help or are just being patched up temporarily, but one or two more successes to balance it out might have made it a little less despairing at times. That's not to say that all the cases were without hope - he wrote of his own son's successful treatment at just a few months old and I found that particularly moving.
It is, above all, a fascinating insight into the difficult and (I found) often distressing work of neurosurgery.