Prachi Singh

“Patients in persistent vegetative state – or PVS as it is called for short – seem to be awake because their eyes are open, yet they show no awareness or responsiveness to the outside world. They are conscious, some would say, but there is no content to their consciousness. They have become an empty shell, there is nobody at home. Yet recent research with functional brain scans shows this is not always the case. Some of these patients, despite being mute and unresponsive, seem to have some kind of activity going on in their brains, and some kind of awareness of the outside world. It is not, however, at all clear what it means. Are they in some kind of perpetual dream state? Are they in heaven, or in hell? Or just dimly aware, with only a fragment of consciousness of which they themselves”
― Henry Marsh, Do No Harm: Stories of Life, Death, and Brain Surgery

“Hope is beyond price and the pharmaceutical companies, which are run by businessmen not altruists, price their products accordingly.”
― Henry Marsh, Do No Harm: Stories of Life, Death and Brain Surgery

“We have achieved most as surgeons when our patients recover completely and forget us completely. All patients are immensely grateful at first after a successful operation but if the gratitude persists it usually means that they have not been cured of the underlying problem and that they fear that they may need us in the future. They feel that they must placate us, as though we were angry gods or at least the agents of an unpredictable fate.”
― Henry Marsh, Do No Harm: Stories of Life, Death, and Brain Surgery

“Angor animi - the sense of being in the act of dying, differing from the fear of death or the desire for death.”
― Henry Marsh, Do No Harm: Stories of Life, Death and Brain Surgery