Who is popular today?

With books by health professionals now the hottest ticket in publishing, we asked five acclaimed authors for their views on politics, the crisis in the NHS – and to name their favourite fictional medic
Born in 1950, Henry Marsh grew up in London and studied politics, philosophy and economics at Oxford before taking up medicine. His decision to specialise in neurosurgery was influenced, in part, by his infant son’s successful treatment for a brain tumour. “A year later, by coincidence, I saw my first serious neurosurgical operation and it was a genuinely epiphanic experience,” he says, “and that’s all I’ve wanted to do ever since.” Until 2015, Marsh was a senior consultant neurosurgeon at St George’s hospital in south London. The year before retiring, he published his first memoir, Do No Harm, which Ian McEwan described as “exquisitely attuned to the tense and transient bond between doctor and patient”. A second book, Admissions: A Life in Brain Surgery, followed in 2017 and a third memoir (less medical, more “philosophical”) is under way. Marsh, who lives between London and Oxford with his wife, the author Kate Fox, continues to perform neurosurgery in Nepal and Ukraine, where he has worked since the early 1990s. Continue reading...