Do no harm. Stories about life, death and neurosurgery (№ 452319)

The bitter truth of neurosurgery is that it takes a lot of practice to learn how to do complex operations well, which means a lot of mistakes at first, after which patients are left crippled. I think you have to be a bit of a psychopath to persist in doing this, or at least very thick-skinned. A doctor who is kind by nature will at some point give up, stop going against nature and confine himself to simple cases.