A psychiatrist colleague, whose opinions I respect, suggested I read Do no Harm, and, having finished it, I bought the second of these two volumes pretty much straight away. Both books have been widely reviewed in newspapers and magazines and a former British Prime Minister has stated that he was moved by the first of them. I found them interesting, useful as a stimulus to reflection upon my own work with very different patients to Marsh's, and I suggest that most health professionals would benefit from reading them, even if they have never been inside an operating theatre or never intend to enter one again.

Marsh is an odd cove. He is very intelligent, highly introspective, notably outspoken, deeply thoughtful and painfully honest. He is aware that a lot of people find him to be a pain in the arse. He worries a lot about patients who have been left worse off by his neurosurgery and understands, unlike some surgeons of his and my acquaintance, that quite often just because we can do something does not mean that we should do it.

There is limited formal discussion of philosophy and philosophers in this book, but it contains a fair bit of homespun philosophical musing. Marsh is very keen on the practical world view of Karl Popper and is a strong advocate for The Open Society and its Enemies. On the other hand he detests Descartes. (Both of these are sound opinions in my view!) Despite the fact that Schopenhauer is never mentioned by name, I found many of his attitudes deeply Schopehauerian; he understands that we are diminished by the suffering of another living entity, whether it is a patient we have treated or an elephant upon whose back we have been invited to ride. He is good on the subject of how personal experience of suffering and illness can make one a better doctor and appreciates how vulnerable are our patients and their families when ill and uncertain. Perhaps his experience of working as a ward assistant in a psychiatric hospital before he qualified had a role in making him a good doctor (like the best doctors he has taken time to learn from his nurse colleagues, especially the charge nurse on a long stay psychiatric ward whose compassion he extolls) and in the second of his books he describes some of the beneficial family influences that bore on his development. One of his attractive features is his constant desire to learn from experience, but he is very good on the tension between trying to give patients the best possible care and the necessity to train junior colleagues, which is likely to mean that some patients won't get an ideal result from whatever is done to them by someone who must learn things by doing them.

There are bound to be things in these books that provoke and annoy you. I don't agree with his implied views on urban foxes or his very clearly articulated attitude to euthanasia, and was appalled by his description of “terminal care professionals, who derive their own sense of meaning and purpose from my suffering”, but I read both books quickly with a strong sense of engagement and always was keen to see what was on the next page. I hope that he does not get the dementia which afflicted his humane and decent father at the end of his long life and that authorship has helped him to exorcize some of the ghosts from his past that have haunted him to date.