Add Henry Marsh to the list. Rothman says, “Do No Harm is an act of atonement, an anatomy of error, and an attempt to answer, from the inside, a startling question: How can someone spend decades cutting into people’s brains and emerge whole?”
Saturday, June 13, 2015
May 18, 2015 Issue
The piece in this week’s issue that most absorbed me is
Joshua Rothman’s "Anatomy of Error." It’s a review of neurosurgeon Henry
Marsh’s memoir, Do No Harm. Medical
writing is, for me, a relatively new interest. I trace my appetite for it to a
quartet of elegant Jerome Groopman pieces that appeared last year: “How Memory
Works” (The New York Review of Books,
May 22, 2014); “The Transformation” (The
New Yorker, September 15, 2014); “When Doctors Admit They Went Wrong” (The New York Review of Books, November
6, 2014); “Print Thyself” (The New Yorker,
November 24, 2014). Groopman writes a graceful, plain-English-style prose.
Judging from the quotations in Rothman’s piece, it seems that Marsh’s style is
similar – plainspoken, eloquent. Rothman calls Marsh “the Knausgaard of
neurosurgery: he writes about his errors because he wants to confess them, and
because he’s interested in his inner life and how it’s been changed, over time,
by the making of mistakes.” I find Marsh’s willingness to confess and explore
his errors fascinating. I applaud his factuality. Groopman, in his excellent
“When Doctors Admit They Went Wrong,” a review of Terrence Holt’s Internal Medicine: A Doctor’s Stories,
criticizes Holt for not recounting recollections of exact events. Holt offered
“parables,” i.e., “assemblages drawn from a variety of sources, compiled from
multiple cases, transformed according to the logic not of journalism but of
parable, seeking to capture the essence of something too complex to be
understood any other way” (Holt’s words). Groopman says,
I was taken aback by Holt’s assertion that only the form of
parable can “capture the essence to something too complex to be understood any
other way.” Tolstoy’s “The Death of Ivan Ilych” is an illuminating parable, as
are the medical tales of Chekhov, Turgenev, and Kafka. But the nonfiction
stories of Oliver Sacks, Robert Coles, Richard Selzer, and Sherwin Nuland, as
well as potent new voices of young doctors like Danielle Ofri, Leah Kaminsky,
and Christine Montross, certainly capture the essence and complexity of the
clinical world.
Add Henry Marsh to the list. Rothman says, “Do No Harm is an act of atonement, an anatomy of error, and an attempt to answer, from the inside, a startling question: How can someone spend decades cutting into people’s brains and emerge whole?”
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment