Death and the Surgeon
Duration: 1 x 93'
Contact SalesStories of Life, Death, and Brain Surgery - An intimate and candid portrait of celebrated neurosurgeon Henry Marsh, filmed over five years as he confronts his own mortality while continuing to operate in Nepal and Ukraine.
Henry Marsh is probably one of the best-known brain surgeons in the world. His three books - Do No Harm, Admissions, And Finally - have all become international best sellers. With good reason. He is searingly honest about his work, where the probability of success is much less than that of doing permanent brain damage.
The film follows detailed operations, tragic deaths, and intense consultations where the hardest truth is that it’s often better to do nothing.
It chronicles his life on the road as teacher and surgeon, spending months every year working in Ukraine and Nepal, helping to train up a cadre of neurosurgeons in these developing countries. Encountering a host of very different challenges as well as the unexpected death of one of his closest colleagues, Professor Devkota, who brought neurosurgery to Kathmandu, and whose hospital he now finds himself deeply involved with.
It is a meditation on mortality, of which he has plenty of experience, of the inscrutability of the human brain, and the wisdom acquired from performing thousands of operations on them. Outspoken and articulate about the intense difficulties of health care around the world he is a passionate advocate for the NHS and socialised medicine and a severe critic of privatised medicine.
Suddenly diagnosed with advanced prostate cancer during the filming, his own death looms ever closer and he is adamant that assisted dying should be legalised. His unflinching regard on death helps us all understand our own mortality.
Propelled into medical celebrity with the 2007 film The English Surgeon, this is the film of these, his later years, as he grapples with retirement and his own death.
