Review of The English Surgeon (2007) by John B — 17 Sep 2009

If you, like me, require a splash of cold perspective now and again, you'd be hard-pressed to do better than The English Surgeon. It came and went pretty quickly in the art houses over the summer, but thank God for PBS's P.

O.V. series, a hub for consistently solid and thought-provoking documentaries. Henry Marsh is a renowned brain surgeon from London who, since the early nineties or so, has made annual trips to Ukraine to help out the locals in and around the capital of Kiev, who otherwise have very little, if any, access to care.

The hospitals there, as the film makes startingly clear up front, are beyond under-equipped and under-staffed. What's more, some of the doctors and nurses are territorial to the point that they make death threats against their colleagues if they're helping too many patients who can't pay.

You'd be amazed to see all the equipment Dr. Marsh has to bring with him. What's more, we get to see that he packs them in crates he builds himself in his backyard. Right away we see this is a man who loves getting his hands dirty and thrives on the art of manual labor, which informs his carpentry hobby and, of course, his profession.

The film does a great job showing Dr. Marsh at his worst. That is, we see that, for all his plaudets and awards, he's all too human. It sucks watching him break the news to an old woman that her toddler grandson has less than a year to live.

Connecting it all together is Marsh's search for the mother of a little girl who died under his watch a few years ago. The disappointment of that has haunted him ever since, and he desperately needs to see her for a sense of closure.

Also you've got Marian, this guy from the countryside, hundreds of miles from Kiev, who's come all the way to the capital so Marsh can remove this tumor that's causing seizures. Toward the end of the film you get to see the surgery.

I've never seen anything like it in my life. This film, through Marsh, makes no bones about it. As good as he is, you can't escape the fact that removing a tumor from the brain will always be guess work to some extent because it's extremely difficult to see where the tumor ends and the healthy brain begins.

As he himself says, one tiny cut in the wrong place and the patient's personality could be changed forever. The unsung hero is the local surgeon who's Marsh's right hand, Dr. Igor Petrovich Kurilets.

Igor Petrovich, as they call him, is the poor bastard who has to translate for Marsh when Marsh tells patients they're going to die soon. Igor Petrovich does his damnedest to maintain a professional countenance and demeanor, but it's tough sometimes, to say the least.

When Marsh tells him to tell the parent that their child is done for or, even more poignant, that he doesn't necessarily need to tell the young twentysomething woman that over the next three years she'll slowly go blind while the cancer eats her up, just because there's a minuscule chance she may survive, that demeanor can't help but crack a little.

It's not all gloom and doom, though. Marsh has that dry wit the English are famous for. And Igor Petrovich is one quirky guy. Death threats don't faze him. To keep us from getting too suicidal, the film does emphasize the positive impact Marsh and Igor have.

It's just tough getting there.