‘The more dangerous the operation, the more I wanted to do it’: neurosurgeon Henry Marsh on mistakes and mortality

The author of three bestselling memoirs was a swashbuckling presence on the wards for three decades. Now undergoing treatment for advanced prostate cancer, he talks about facing death and living without regrets

I n his retirement, Henry Marsh is visited by all the patients he used to treat. But his doorbell never rings. They are spectres, or as Marsh might more accurately describe it, synaptic impulses. “There are thousands of them,” says the former neurosurgeon and bestselling author. “I must have forgotten quite a lot. They’re all there. On the whole they’re benign ghosts.”

The visits began after Marsh, who is 72, was diagnosed with advanced prostate cancer in early 2020. He wondered whether, “if I remembered them all, and they forgave me, then I would survive”. Marsh succumbed to other forms of magical thinking. When cycling around London, he would tell himself that if the traffic lights changed at a particular time, he would be all right. “It’s totally ridiculous,” he says. “But the idea of our future being out of our control is very frightening. We have all these mechanisms for trying to feel in control, and superstition is one of them.”

We are sitting in the kitchen of Marsh’s Wimbledon home, which will be familiar to readers of his trio of memoirs – Do No Harm, Admissions and the just-published And Finally – as the site of his frequent home-improvement projects. Marsh did the loft extension himself; he spent the weekend laying patio flagstones.

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