Prominent neurosurgeon Dr Henry Marsh Zooms in to help Ukrainian doctors
BY TOBY PORTER
toby@slpmedia.co.uk
A surgeon is showing Ukraine’s doctors how to cope with the injuries of war.
Henry Marsh, a high-profile neurosurgeon, from Clapham, has been training medics over Zoom calls on how to make the brutal calculations which are necessary in war.
He is also the author of Do No Harm – Stories of Life, Death and Brain Surgery has been travelling to the war-torn Eastern European country for decades to lecture.
The 72-year-old, a prominent advocate of assisted dying, was diagnosed with prostate cancer – and has thought of travelling out there to help in the war.
He told The Times: “I thought it would be quite a good way to die.
“I don’t have long to live anyway.
“My family would be very unhappy. But if it meant they didn’t have to look after me in the event that I survived cancer but get dementia.
“It’s very painful sitting in my comfortable room giving advice to doctor friends who are facing death when operating in underground shelters while their country is being raised to the ground by Russian rockets.”
The former consultant at St George’s Hospital, Tooting, got a text saying “war” at 4am on February 20 and has had little sleep since. In the last three weeks, he’s being teaching friends in Mariupol then Kharkiv and now Kyiv.
He has been Zooming crash courses in trauma medicine alongside war doctor David Nott.
Mr Marsh spent his 72nd birthday on March 5, training hundreds of Ukraine medical staff in war injuries on a 12-hour webinar.
This can involve very different wounds from low velocity bullets, tank rounds, artillery shells, and flying glass.
They have created slides to show how to deal with blast injuries to the lungs and abdomen, hemorrhages, burns and the damage caused by cluster bombs.
Shock waves from bombs can cause massive internal bleeding but without CT scans that can be impossible to diagnose – it is completely different to civilian medicine where surgeons work in specialised areas.
Brain surgeons hold death in their hands everyday and must learn to cope with grief and bereavement, he said – but not on this scale.
Staff have to learn how to triage quickly. When a bomb or shell goes off, there will be a huge rush of patients. Surgeons will have to quickly divide them up into those who need immediate help but can be saved – and those who will die anyway.
Ukrainian consultants have had to cancel regular operations and clinics. Children with cancer are being denied treatment, the elderly with dementia will go without care, People with disabilities will be in need.
Nurses will have to be focused on getting food, water and equipment, preventing dehydration and starvation and operating on the injured.
Mr Marsh’s young colleagues want to fight. “But I tell them they will save more lives as doctors than with guns,” he said.
Pictured: Dr Henry Thomas Marsh
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