Henry Marsh: Author Bio About and Best Quotes

Ten of My Favorite Henry Marsh Quotes 

Henry Marsh, a writer whom I am guessing you love? Here are our 10 best Henry Marsh quotes for you to enjoy. At Australia Unwrapped we believe every book has at least one quotable line, and our mission is to find them all. Here you will find Henry Marsh’s top 10 popular and famous quotes. Like every good writer Henry Marsh made a number of memorable quotes, here are some of our favorites: 

About Henry Marsh

Henry Marsh studied Politics, Philosophy, and Economics at Oxford University before pursuing medicine at the Royal Free Hospital in London. In 1987, he was appointed Consultant Neurosurgeon at Atkinson Morley’s/St George’s Hospital in London, where he still works full-time.

He was the subject of two major documentary films, YOUR LIFE IN THEIR HANDS, which won the ROYAL TELEVISION SOCIETY GOLD MEDAL, and THE ENGLISH SURGEON, which won the EMMY. He was made a CBE in 2010. It is a pleasure for him to be married to the anthropologist and writer Kate Fox.

Do No Harm is his first book.

Popular Quotes

“Anxiety might be contagious, but confidence is also contagious”
― Henry Marsh, Do No Harm: Stories of Life, Death and Brain Surgery

 “Healthy people, I have concluded, including myself, do not understand how everything changes once you have been diagnosed with a fatal illness. How you cling to hope, however false, however slight, and how reluctant most doctors are to deprive patients of that fragile beam of light in so much darkness. Indeed, many people develop what psychiatrists call ‘dissociation’ and a doctor can find himself talking to two people – they know that they are dying and yet still hope that they will live. I had noticed the same phenomenon with my mother during the last few days of her life. When faced by people who are dying you are no longer dealing with the rational consumers assumed by economic model-builders, if they ever existed in the first place.”
― Henry Marsh, Do No Harm: Stories of Life, Death and Brain Surgery

“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, Do No Harm: Stories of Life, Death and Brain Surgery

 “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, Do No Harm: Stories of Life, Death, and Brain Surgery

 “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, Do No Harm: Stories of Life, Death, and Brain Surgery

 “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.’ René Leriche, La philosophie de la chirurgie, 1951”
― Henry Marsh, Do No Harm: Stories of Life, Death, and Brain Surgery

“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

 “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, Do No Harm: Stories of Life, Death, and Brain Surgery

“Life without hope is hopelessly difficult but at the end hope can so easily make fools of us all.”
― Henry Marsh, Do No Harm: Stories of Life, Death and Brain Surgery

“But death is not always a bad outcome, you know, and a quick death can be better than a slow one.”
― Henry Marsh, Do No Harm: Stories of Life, Death and Brain Surgery

10 Famous Quotes by Author Henry Marsh

Quotes for all, here you found our selection of 10 Henry Marsh quotes. Make sure you help by commenting your best Henry Marsh quote below and sharing our favorite authors so we can look them up, read some of their works and give you the best quotes we can find. We hope you enjoyed our top 10 quotes by Henry Marsh. However, feel free to comment below if you disagree or would like to include some other great and memorable Henry Marsh quotes in our list. 

One Final Bonus – Henry Marsh Quote 

“Neuroscience tells us that it is highly improbable that we have souls, as everything we think and feel is no more or no less than the electrochemical chatter of our nerve cells. Our sense of self, our feelings and our thoughts, our love for others, our hopes and ambitions, our hates and fears all die when our brains die. Many people deeply resent this view of things, which not only deprives us of life after death but also seems to downgrade thought to mere electrochemistry and reduces us to mere automata, to machines. Such people are profoundly mistaken, since what it really does is upgrade matter into something infinitely mysterious that we do not understand. There are one hundred billion nerve cells in our brains. Does each one have a fragment of consciousness within it? How many nerve cells do we require to be conscious or to feel pain? Or does consciousness and thought reside in the electrochemical impulses that join these billions of cells together? Is a snail aware? Does it feel pain when you crush it underfoot? Nobody knows.”
― Henry Marsh, Do No Harm: Stories of Life, Death, and Brain Surgery

More from the Author: https://amzn.to/3wcUBvD

Also see: Herman Koch: Author Bio About and Best Quotes