Early on in Confessions of a Brain Surgeon, a crew member pipes up from behind the camera. Would Henry Marsh mind saying something, anything, to see if the microphones are working? “When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,” Marsh says instantly, not pausing for a moment to gather the words, “I all alone beweep my outcast state, and trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries, and look upon myself and curse my fate.” A simple “testing testing, one two” would be standard practice, but Marsh is not your standard documentary subject.
Marsh is a retired neurosurgeon, having spent decades at the top of his profession. You’ve probably seen hospital documentaries that have featured an “awake craniotomy”, the macabre procedure that keeps a patient with a sawn-open skull conscious, so the effect of the scalpel’s cuts can be monitored in real time. Marsh, along with his longterm colleague, anaesthetist Judith Dinsmore, pioneered that. He performed numerous other exceptionally advanced operations with unique skill. Countless patients who were told by less able, less imaginative medics that they were terminally ill were treated successfully by Marsh.
