Henry L Marsh Quotes & Sayings

But death is not always a bad outcome, you know, and a quick death can be better than a slow one. — Henry Marsh

Anxiety might be contagious, but confidence is also contagious — Henry Marsh

The idea that my sucker is moving through thought itself, through emotion and reason, that memories, dreams and reflections should consist of jelly, is simply too strange to understand. — Henry Marsh

Angor animi - the sense of being in the act of dying, differing from the fear of death or the desire for death. — Henry Marsh

Fight for your existence and when doing this, try to be just to others! You have no job other than this in this universe! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

We have achieved most as surgeons when our patients recover completely and forget us completely. All patients are immensely grateful at first after a successful operation but if the gratitude persists it usually means that they have not been cured of the underlying problem and that they fear that they may need us in the future. They feel that they must placate us, as though we were angry gods or at least the agents of an unpredictable fate. — Henry Marsh

We lauhed together for a long time. When we
had first met, her eyes were dull with pain-killing drugs and if she
tried to talk, her face would controt with agonizing pain. I thought
how radiantly beautiful she now looked. She stood up to leave and went
to the door but then came back and kissed me.
'I hope I never see you again,' she said.
'I quite understand,' I replied. — Henry Marsh

CSF used to be called "gin-clear" when there was no blood or infection in it,' I say to Jeff. 'But probably we're now supposed to use alcohol-free terminology.' I — Henry Marsh

When I tell a patient that I think I should do their operation under local anaesthetic they usually look a little shocked. In fact the brain cannot itself feel pain since pain is a phenomenon produced within the brain. — Henry Marsh

How are you feeling?' I asked. 'Fine,' he replied with a tired smile. 'Well done!' I replied, as I think patients need to be congratulated for their surviving just as much as the surgeons should be congratulated for doing their job well. 'It's — Henry Marsh

Some of my operations are great triumphs and tremendous. But they're only triumphs because there are also disasters — Henry Marsh

My readiness to admit to my fallibility is perhaps rather English, but I hope that the problems I describe will be familiar to doctors and patients everywhere. — Henry Marsh

Pansies in soft April rains Fill their stalks with honeyed sap Drawn from Earth's prolific lap. — Bayard Taylor

Hope is beyond price and the pharmaceutical companies, which are run by businessmen not altruists, price their products accordingly. — Henry Marsh

We need the tonic of the wilderness, to wade sometimes in the marsh where the bitten and the meadow hen lurk, and hear the booming of the snipe; to smell the whispering sedge where only some wilder and more solitary fowl builds her nest, and the mink crawls with its belly close to the ground. — Henry David Thoreau

I may be more passionate about my comedy because that's the one place where I feel comfortable - because I'm in the now. Performing is the only time of the day when I have to really force every ounce of concentration into whatever's happening in that moment. — Howie Mandel

Next morning I showed her brain scan to the juniors at — Henry Marsh

Thoreau the "Patron Saint of Swamps" because he enjoyed being in them and writing about them said, "my temple is the swamp ... When I would recreate myself, I seek the darkest wood, the thickest and most impenetrable and to the citizen, most dismal, swamp. I enter a swamp as a sacred place, a sanctum sanctorum ... I seemed to have reached a new world, so wild a place ... far away from human society. What's the need of visiting far-off mountains and bogs, if a half-hour's walk will carry me into such wildness and novelty. — Henry David Thoreau

There are few places in England where you can get so much wildness and desolation of sea and sandhills, wood, green marsh and grey saltings as at Wells in Norfolk. — William Henry Hudson

It cannot but affect our philosophy favorably to be reminded of these shoals of migratory fishes, of salmon, shad, alewives, marsh-bankers, and others, which penetrate up the innumerable rivers of our coast in the spring, even to the interior lakes, their scales gleaming in the sun; and again, of the fry which in still greater numbers wend their way downward to the sea. — Henry David Thoreau

Parents have to really talk to their children before they leave home. — Aretha Franklin

But I then thought of how the value of my work as a doctor is measured solely in the value of other people's lives, and that included the people in front of me in the check-out queue. — Henry Marsh

There is no substitute for finding true purpose. But the true or primary purpose of your life cannot be found on the outer level. It does not concern what you do but what you are - that is to say, your state of consciousness. — Eckhart Tolle

The operating is the easy part, you know,' he said. 'By my age you realize that the difficulties are all to do with the decision-making. — Henry Marsh

When push comes to shove we can afford to lose an arm or a leg, but I am operating on peoples thoughts and feelings... and if something goes wrong I can destroy that persons character... forever. — Henry Marsh

Doctors need to be held accountable, since power corrupts. There must be complaints procedures and litigation, commissions of enquiry, punishment and compensation. At the same time if you do not hide or deny any mistakes when things go wrong, and if your patients and their families know that you are distressed by whatever happened, you might, if you are lucky, receive the precious gift of forgiveness. — Henry Marsh

Life without hope is hopelessly difficult but at the end hope can so easily make fools of us all. — Henry Marsh

I know for some girls, tight clothes make them feel like they can take on the world-and that's fine too. But I don't think that sexy only means showing skin: It's all about wearing whatever makes you feel the most badass. — Holland Roden

Whenever I visit a market and see the chickens crowded together in tiny cages that give them no room to move around and spread their wings and the fish slowly drowning in the air, my heart goes out to them. People have to learn to think about animals in a different way, as sentient beings who love life and fear death. I urge everyone who can to adopt a compassionate vegetarian diet. — Dalai Lama