Siddhartha Mukherjee meets Henry Marsh: ‘When do you stop treating a patient? At 100?’

The cancer specialist and the neurosurgeon talk about treating cancer, writing and facing death in their own families

The year he retired from full-time practice, in 2014, Henry Marsh published Do No Harm, a likable and arrestingly honest memoir about his 40-year career as a brain surgeon. Four years earlier, while still a consultant at St George’s hospital in south London, he had reviewed the debut work of another doctor-writer, Siddhartha Mukherjee, an Indian-American oncologist who, in The Emperor Of All Maladies, explored in incredible depth the history of cancer and its treatment. (Marsh called that book “exhaustive, and exhausting”. It went on to win the Guardian First Book award and a Pulitzer prize.)

Mukherjee is now 47 and lives in New York; Marsh, 67, lives in Oxford. To different extents both of these doctors still practise in their respective fields – Mukherjee at Columbia University’s cancer centre, Marsh as a visiting doctor at various hospitals around the world, including in Kathmandu in Nepal. Both men have continued to write: Marsh a second volume of autobiography, called Admissions, published this year, and Mukherjee a study of genetics called The Gene: An Intimate History, published last year. When they sat down to talk to each other over Skype one Saturday afternoon in November, they began with a subject on which their two lifelong disciplines overlap: the treatment of brain cancer. Tom Lamont

I have difficult conversations all the time with patients. But when my father was dying, the dread was astonishing

I can’t stand the idea of the patient-as-consumer: it makes stupid a relationship that is extraordinarily complicated

We have to become detached. The problem is, you mustn’t become too detached

Continue reading... December 02, 2017 at 02:30PM