Henry Marsh

Henry Thomas Marsh CBE FRCS (born 5 March 1950) is an English neurosurgeon and best-selling author, a pioneer of awake craniotomy techniques and of neurosurgical work in Ukraine. His widely acclaimed memoir Do No Harm: Stories of Life, Death and Brain Surgery was published in 2014. It has been translated into 37 languages. According to The Economist, this memoir is "so elegantly written it is little wonder some say that in Mr Marsh neurosurgery has found its Boswell." His second memoir Admissions: A life in brain surgery was published in 2017. And Finally, his most recent book, was published in 2022 to critical acclaim and explores his transition from doctor to patient. Early life Marsh is the youngest of his parents' four children. His parents were the law reformer Norman Stayner Marsh (1913–2008) and bookseller Christiane "Christel" Christinnecke (1917-2000). His mother relocated from Halle in Germany to England in 1939 after she had been denounced to the Gestapo for "making anti-Nazi comments". They married in London in the late summer of 1939. They played a leading role in the creation of the human rights organisation Amnesty International, the brainchild of the lawyer and activist Peter Benenson. Marsh was born in 1950, in the countryside outside Oxford. His father taught law at Oxford University. Marsh attended the Dragon School in Oxford. The family later moved to Clapham in London and he was sent to Westminster School, for a while as a boarder. Academically successful, he studied Politics, Philosophy and Economics at University College, Oxford University, achieving First Class Honours, before graduating with Honours in Medicine from the Royal Free Medical School. His educational background and its social implications, however, left psychological issues and Marsh, contemplating suicide, was a voluntary patient for a while, taking a year off from studying to work as a porter in a northern hospital. Career Marsh was until 2015 the senior consultant neurosurgeon at the Atkinson Morley Wing at St George's Hospital, south London, one of the country's largest specialist brain surgery units.