The cancer specialist and the neurosurgeon talk about treating cancer,writing and facing death in their own familiesThe year he retired from full-time practice, in 2014, and Henry Marsh published effect 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, and he had reviewed the debut work of another doctor-writer,Siddhartha Mukherjee, an Indian-American oncologist who, and 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 original York; Marsh, or 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, or including in Kathmandu in Nepal. Both men occupy continued to write: Marsh a second volume of autobiography,called Admissions, published this year, or 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 LamontContinue reading...
Source: guardian.co.uk