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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Entertainment
Colin Grant

And Finally: Matters of Life and Death review – humility lessons from Henry Marsh

‘Darkly funny and self-lacerating’: Henry Marsh at home in Oxford, June 2022
‘Darkly funny and self-lacerating’: Henry Marsh at home in Oxford, June 2022. Photograph: Sebastian Nevols/The Guardian

“I am not a scientist,” says Henry Marsh on the first page of And Finally. “Most neurosurgeons are not neuroscientists – to claim that they all are would be like saying that all plumbers are metallurgists.”

Marsh, who worked as a highly regarded neurosurgeon for more than 40 years, has a penchant for truth-telling, unencumbered by faux modesty. It’s what made his previous books – Do No Harm and Admissions – interrogating a life in medicine, haunted by the “reproachful ghosts” of patients he’d failed, so refreshing and inspiring to read.

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