Biography: science, technology & medicine

What is it really like to be a brain surgeon, to hold someone’s life in your hands, to drill down into the stuff that creates thought, feeling and reason? How do you live with the consequences of performing a potentially life-saving operation when it all goes wrong? In this powerful, gripping and brutally honest account, one of the country’s top neurosurgeons reveals what it is to play god in the face of the life-and-death situations he encounters daily. Henry Marsh gives a rare insight into the intense drama of the operating theatre, the chaos and confusion of a modern hospital, the exquisite complexity of the human brain, and the blunt instrument that is surgeon’s knife by comparison.