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Outlook: Painfully honest: A brain surgeon looks back on his mistakes

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Henry Marsh

10/11/2022 GMT

Painfully honest: A brain surgeon looks back on his mistakes

BBC World Service - Outlook, Painfully honest: A brain surgeon looks back on his mistakes

Living with cancer had made Henry Marsh reflect on the people he could not save

Henry Marsh is a pioneering brain surgeon known for radical honesty.  Now living with cancer, he reflects on the risks of his profession – both to his patients and to himself.

Henry Marsh is a pioneering British brain surgeon living with cancer. Now semi-retired, throughout his career he was known for his radical honesty, including once giving a lecture entitled “All My Worst Mistakes,” and inviting patients to sue him for operations that went wrong. In the face of his own diagnosis, he began to be haunted by the ‘ghosts’ of patients he hadn’t been able to save: “I don’t remember my successes at all. All I remember are the failures.”  

Dr Rachel Clarke spends her working life in the company of people who are dying. And she says they’ve taught her everything she needs to know about living. She works in palliative care for England’s National Health Service, providing support for people at the end of their lives. She adores her job - she's written a book about how much she gets out of it. But when her beloved father became terminally ill, she had to face his decline as a daughter, not a doctor. Rachel Clarke spoke to Jo Fidgen in July 2020.

Get in touch: outlook@bbc.com

Presenter: Jo Fidgen

(Photo: Henry Marsh. Credit: Simone Padovani/Awakening/Getty Images)

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