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Life without hope is hopelessly difficult but at the end hope can so easily make fools of us all.

Every surgeon carries within himself a small cemetery, where from time to time he goes to pray – a place of bitterness and regret, where he must look for an explanation for his failures.’ René Leriche, La philosophie de la chirurgie, 1951.

The operating is the easy part, you know,’ he said. ‘By my age you realize that the difficulties are all to do with the decision-making.

Anxiety might be contagious, but confidence is also contagious.

Most medical students go through a brief period when they develop all manner of imaginary illnesses – I myself had leukaemia for at least four days – until they learn, as a matter of self-preservation, that illnesses happen to patients, not to doctors.

Surgeons must always tell the truth but rarely, if ever, deprive patients of all hope. It can be very difficult to find the balance between optimism and realism.

And now all those brain cells are dead – and my mother – who in a sense was the complex electrochemical interaction of all these millions of neurons – is no more. In neuroscience it is called ‘the binding problem’ – the extraordinary fact, which nobody can even begin to explain, that mere brute matter can give rise to consciousness and sensation. I had such a strong sensation, as she lay dying, that some deeper, ‘real’ person was still there behind the death mask.

Hope is beyond price and the pharmaceutical companies, which are run by businessmen not altruists, price their products accordingly.

But death is not always a bad outcome, you know, and a quick death can be better than a slow one.