The English Surgeon

The English Surgeon

93 Minutes

Henry Marsh, the British neurosurgeon and subject of Geoffrey Smith's The English Surgeon, has been making an annual trip to the Ukraine for past 15 years to aid a Ukrainian colleague in modernizing Kiev's medical practices. He does not go to Kiev for money but rather for the altruistic purpose of helping those in need. But Marsh's trips are not the result of dreamy optimism, nor are they product of a romantic crusade to change the system. Rather, as Marsh states at the film's close, "What are we if we don't try to help others? We are nothing, nothing at all."

Though Smith's portrait is deceptively simple, The English Surgeon has some serious questions lurking beneath its surface. Along with Marsh, the film also focuses on Marian Dolishny, a man from a village hundreds of miles away from Kiev, who suffers from epilepsy as result of a very large brain tumor. Marsh makes it clear that the procedure to remove the tumor would be more or less elementary in the UK, but with Kiev's rudimentary technology, the procedure becomes infinitely more risky. Smith takes us into the operating theater as Marsh attempts to remove the tumor with Dolishny numbed only by local anesthetic. Though gruesome, it's a fascinating sequence that affords us a front row seat to the procedure.

In our society, we look at doctors as infallible shaman who can help rid us of bad health and even save our lives. While there is some magic involved in the removal of brain tumors, doctors are fallible, exemplified by a struggle with their humanity and humility. Marsh recognizes the emotional struggle for the two players, patient and physician. He is a steadfast optimist and states that even in a hopeless situation, the patient must feel some shred of hope, all the while cognizant of the possible horror of providing people with false promise.

Smith wisely does not allow his portrait of Marsh to devolve into a banal weeper as the doctor visits the family of a girl whose surgery he botched years before, leading to her death. Instead, this emotional reunion allows the cracks in Marsh's otherwise steely demeanor to become visible. Marsh is aware that emotion prompted him to attempt this near impossible surgery and he uses it to countercheck his sometimes heroic notions.

The English Surgeon's narrative reveals in blunt details much about Marsh's fight against death and the devastating effects it has when, humanly, he fails. There may not be a more heartbreaking scene than when Marsh weighs the decision to inform a 23-year-old woman that she will be blind, then dead in a matter of years. Using a haunting score by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis, The English Surgeon keenly shows us Marsh's battle with humility and allows us to share with him the triumphs of his successes and sorrow of his failures.

by David Harris