From surgeon’s scrubs to patient’s gown

Who would you trust to take a blade to your brain? Medical schools and hospitals, arbiters of this outrageous intimacy, select the steadiest hands and the steadiest temperaments. Neurosurgery has an almost religious aura, an intellectual status approaching quantum physics and a work ethic of unforgiving precision. Most elusive of all, this elite should be able to express the pleasures and pains of being human. Ian McEwan’s fictional neurosurgeon, Henry Perowne, is suspicious in his indifference to literature, whereas Henry Marsh, neurosurgical consultant and author of Do No Harm, has earned respect through his elegant prose. To take care with words is invaluable in the heroic efforts of preserving personhood.

Paul Kalanithi was to become one of these rare surgeon-storytellers. After studying English at Stanford, then history and philosophy of science at Cambridge, medicine was a calling he heard late. Intrigued by man’s finitude, he believed that psychiatry would trump the humanities in getting to the essence of what really matters.