Man is small, life is large.

January 2, 2016 7:03 AM

Dr. Henry Marsh has performed 400 "awake craniotomies" -- a surgical procedure he helped pioneer -- in which a specific kind of brain tumor that looks just like the brain itself is identified through electric stimulation and removed. Without surgery, 50 percent of patients die within 5 years; 80 percent within 10 years, and the operation can prolong their lives by 10 to 20 years or more. He was profiled in a 2007 documentary: The English Surgeon as well as this article by Karl Ove Knausgaard: The Terrible Beauty of Brain Surgery. Images in some links in this post may be disturbing to some viewers.
posted by zarq (9 comments total)

The Times article was really good, with striking photographs, but, god help me, all I could think was this.
posted by saucysault at 7:48 AM on January 2, 2016

I also thought the Times piece was great, as were the photos.

I'll add this to the list of things I'm glad I don't have to worry about in my job:

“You don’t want to damage that,” Marsh said and let me look at a blood vessel in the microscope, blue amid the folds of the brain. “If that is damaged, the blood can’t leave the head, and the brain will fill with blood.”

“How far away is it from the tumor?” I asked.

“Oh, one or two millimeters,” Marsh said.

I also thought of Eddie Adcock's (different type of) awake brain surgery, performed while he was playing the banjo (previously).
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 9:14 AM on January 2, 2016 [2 favorites]

This also reminded me that Marsh's book Anatomy of Errors is still on my reading list. Be it resolved I'll get to this in 2016.
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 9:25 AM on January 2, 2016 [1 favorite]

The English Surgeon is a beautiful film. Marsh's care for his patients and the desperate poverty of his patients, some travelling a thousand kilometers away for the first time to obtain his services in Kiev, brought me to tears.
posted by Theiform at 9:46 AM on January 2, 2016 [1 favorite]

His book, rather, is Do No Harm. I copy pasta'd the review title instead of the book. Carry on.
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 9:50 AM on January 2, 2016 [1 favorite]

I haven't seen the documentary but I liked his book - an unusually honest account of the highs and lows of cutting into people's skulls.
posted by atoxyl at 12:05 PM on January 2, 2016

Knausgaard's article is incredible. I can't imagine what it must take to cut into a brain, confident that you're helping the person whose mind it contains; scalpels are just so much bigger than neurons.

When I stepped aside to make room for Marsh again, I struggled to unite the two perspectives; it felt as if I were on two different levels of reality at the same time, as when I walked in my sleep, and dream and reality struggled for ascendancy. I had looked into a room, unlike any other, and when I lifted my gaze, that room was inside Hasanaj’s brain, who lay staring straight ahead under the drape in the larger room, filled with doctors and nurses and machines and equipment, and beyond that room there was an even larger room, warm and dusty and made of asphalt and concrete, beneath a chain of green mountains and a blue sky.

All those rooms were gathered in my own brain, which looked exactly like Hasanaj’s, a wet, gleaming, walnutlike lump, composed of 100 billion brain cells so tiny and so myriad they could only be compared to the stars of a galaxy. And yet what they formed was flesh, and the processes they harbored were simple and primitive, regulated by various chemical substances and powered by electricity. How could it contain these images of the world? How could thoughts arise within this hunk of flesh?

posted by Rangi at 12:18 PM on January 2, 2016 [1 favorite]

Just nthing his book is terrific, I finished it just before Christmas.
posted by smoke at 1:54 PM on January 2, 2016

Images in some links in this post may be disturbing to some viewers.

The images from the article were fine. The popup ad for Omaha Steaks was a bit disconcerting.
posted by hal9k at 7:12 PM on January 2, 2016 [3 favorites]