Henry Marsh (neurosurgeon)


Henry Thomas Marsh CBE FRCS is a leading English neurosurgeon, and a pioneer of neurosurgical advances in Ukraine. His widely acclaimed memoir Do No Harm: Stories of Life, Death and Brain Surgery was published in 2014. 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." A further memoir Admissions: A life in brain surgery was published in 2017.

Early life and education

Marsh attended the Dragon School in Oxford and Westminster School in London. Later he read 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.

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.
He specialises in operating on the brain under local anaesthetic and was the subject of a major BBC documentary Your Life in Their Hands in 2004, which won the Royal Television Society Gold Medal.
He has been working with neurosurgeons in the former Soviet Union, mainly in Ukraine with protégé neurosurgeon Igor Kurilets, since 1992 and his work there was the subject of the BBC Storyville film The English Surgeon from 2007.
He has a particular interest in the influence of hospital buildings and design on patient outcomes and staff morale; he has broadcast and lectured widely on this subject.
In 2017, Marsh published Admissions: Life as a Brain Surgeon, a second memoir with Weidenfeld & Nicolson, an imprint of Orion.
Marsh was the castaway on BBC Radio 4's long-running Desert Island Discs in September 2018. His favourite selection was Better Not Look Down by B. B. King.

Awards and honours

Marsh was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the 2010 Birthday Honours. Also in 2010 he presented the Leslie Oliver Oration at Queen's Hospital.

Personal life

He is the youngest of his parents' four children. His parents, the distinguished law reformer Norman Stayner Marsh and bookshop owner Christiane "Christel" Christinnecke, relocated from Halle in Germany to England in 1939 after his mother had been denounced to the authorities for "making anti-Nazi comments". They married in London in the late summer of 1939.
Henry Marsh is married to the social anthropologist Kate Fox and spends his spare time making furniture and keeping bees. He is a younger brother of the architectural historian Bridget Cherry.

Publications