Do No Harm Stories of Life, Death and Brain Surgery

What is it like to be a brain surgeon? How does it feel to hold someone's life in your hands, to cut 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 neurosurgery, more than in any other branch of medicine, the doctor's oath to 'do no harm' holds a bitter irony. In this gripping memoir, one of Britain's top neurosurgeons reveals what it is to play god in the face of the life-and-death decisions he encounters daily. The stories give us 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 in comparison. But above all this is a book about the moving personal dilemmas that lie behind every operation he performs, and his encounters with patients whose lives are balanced on a knife's edge.