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1-Page Summary of Do No Harm

Overview

Neurosurgeon Henry Marsh shares his memoir, with a focus on regrets and mistakes.

Marsh grew up in a family of privilege. As a child, he struggled with romance, which eventually led him to pursue medicine. He returned to college after being inspired by his time as an orderly at a hospital and finished school despite fears that he lacked scientific knowledge.

Marsh was a medical student who worked as a nursing assistant on the psycho-geriatric ward of a long term psychiatric hospital. There, he saw many patients with severe mental disorders that had been treated by lobectomies. The procedure would often leave the patient in worse condition than before.

When Marsh was a resident, he operated on his son who had a brain tumor. The surgery went well and the child survived. Later in life, Marsh would operate on another boy with a similar condition as his son’s to implant a drainage tube in his skull. Unfortunately, the patient died of hemorrhaging years later because of complications from that surgery.

After six months, William had another operation at a different hospital. He became a junior doctor there and was called to check on one of his patients who was breathing heavily. The patient died of a heart attack moments later.

A year later, he observed an operation on a patient’s brain. He was unsure whether or not he wanted to pursue a career in medicine at that time. However, the use of microscopes and microscopic instruments fascinated him and made him decide to become a neurosurgeon.

Marsh was a neurosurgeon. During his early days, he argued with other surgeons about their use of operating rooms. He felt that they were using the wrong tools for the job and decided to address this problem during surgery. Unfortunately, one of the nerves in a man’s face was damaged during this operation because Marsh operated while angry instead of being calm and collected like he should have been.

When he was a neurosurgeon, Dr. Marsh held staff meetings every morning to prepare for the day’s surgeries. At one such meeting, they discussed a patient with an un-ruptured aneurysm who wanted surgery because of complications that could occur if it ruptured. During the operation, the clip applicator malfunctioned and almost caused her to rupture. However, Dr. Marsh took great risk to reposition it three times in order not to cause any harm or damage to his patient during surgery.

Marsh once worked with a woman named Melanie who was suffering from a brain tumor. He successfully removed the tumor, and she went on to have a baby. However, another patient suffered a hemorrhage after surgery and died shortly afterward in her coma.

A neurosurgeon named Igor Kurilets wanted to improve the neurological care in Ukraine. He was not allowed to do so, but he went abroad for training and then returned with a plan. The author helped him by operating on patients’ facial nerves at the Ukrainian hospital, which made headlines in local news outlets.

After his first successful operation in Ukraine, Marsh began an outpatient clinic for difficult neurosurgical cases in the country at Kurilets’ encouragement. He offered to fly two patients, Ludmilla and Tanya, to London for surgery. The former recovered well from her surgery; however, the latter died a year later due to complications from her surgery.

Dr. Marsh often had meetings with his staff about the treatment of patients. One was about an elderly woman who did not want to sacrifice her independent lifestyle for treatment of a chronic brain condition, while another was about an elderly woman with a benign brain tumor who was losing memories and mental capacity. Her children wanted Dr. Marsh to remove the tumor, but there were repeated delays in doing so; however, he eventually removed it successfully and offered the woman an improvement in her quality of life.