AHRQ Patient Safety Network ► Do No Harm: Stories of Life, Death, and Brain Surgery.

AHRQ Patient Safety Network



Do No Harm: Stories of Life, Death, and Brain Surgery.

Marsh H. New York, NY: Thomas Dunne Books; 2015. ISBN: 9781250065810.

This intensely personal memoir by the famed British neurosurgeon Henry Marsh is no hagiography or recitation of his many accomplishments. Instead, Marsh relates many errors he has committed or witnessed, and the personal toll these errors have taken on his patients and himself. He recreates these stories in vivid detail, acknowledging the effect that his own emotional state had on committing both cognitive and technical errors. Marsh was inspired to write this book in part by reading the work of Daniel Kahneman, the Nobel Prize–winning psychologist whose research established the mechanisms by which humans commit cognitive errors. Along with Atul Gawande's Complications, this book stands as an essential human perspective on error in medicine.

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