Henry Marsh, a British neurosurgeon, became a star of today's news by performing major brain surgery on Marian Dolishny—with a cordless $60 hand drill. And the drill ran out of batteries about halfway through, so Doc MacGyver finished the procedure by hand. And there was no anesthesiologist, so the patient only got a local painkiller. Oh, and there happened to be a television crew present—filming a documentary on Marsh and his hand-drill surgeries.
While the newspapers painted the incident as a spontaneous "emergency operation"—as if the surgeon suddenly came across a woman dying from an invasive brain tumor and was able to scrounge up a power drill, dying batteries, and local anesthetic—the surgery was scheduled at a clinic, and is actually somewhat routine for Marsh. He travels to the Ukraine twice a year to perform such free operations at the clinic, where local doctors cannot afford state-of-the-art equipment. (Marsh's hospital ...
