“We blamed you for Max’s death,” Max’s mother, Tina, tells Marsh, who sits and listens, thoroughly humbled. Tina reminds him – though Marsh needs no reminding; he remembers perfectly well – that Max, aged five, had an aggressive brain cancer that Marsh considered himself “one of only two people in the world” to be able to help with. (Marsh to Tina now: “Goodness. Did I really say that?”) Tina tells him that he was “gung ho” and “arrogant”. It was in this state of supreme self-confidence that Marsh performed surgery on young Max, successfully.
In an era where television is filled with medical documentaries, Confessions of a Brain Surgeon is unusually compelling fare. Now 74, Marsh says he wants to “return to confront the past” and the result makes for discomfiting but utterly gripping viewing.
Marsh is now married to anthropologist Kate Fox (Photo: BBC/Curious Films)
There’s a pertinent reason for his late-arriving empathy. Marsh has recently become in need of doctors himself, after a diagnosis of prostate cancer. “I realise now how horrible it is being a patient,” he says. “It’s demeaning, frightening.”
That brilliance came at a cost, however. He was a workaholic for decades, and when eventually he did go home, he did DIY around the house rather than spend time with his wife and children. “I wasn’t a good father,” he admits. His marriage ultimately fell apart.
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A programme this critical would ordinarily need to be unauthorised, so Marsh’s willing involvement here is almost masochistic. He has done so much good in his career, yet he can focus only on what went wrong, and how he is to blame. His repentance is almost biblical.
But Marsh doesn’t die in Ukraine. He comes home, still alive, still haunted by the past. He does his DIY, and tends to his garden. Of his cancer, he says he is “not phlegmatic, but frightened and upset”. At one point, he tells a colleague: “I’m not godlike at all. I make mistakes.”
‘Confessions of a Brain Surgeon’ is streaming on BBC iPlayer
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