Professional flutist Anna Marie Whitlock Henry has amazed and entertained doctors and hospital staff by playing the flute during neurosurgery in Houston on Tuesday.

The musician has taught and played the flute with symphony orchestras for 50 years and is currently the principal flutist with Texas’s Big Spring Symphony Orchestra. Throughout all this time she has suffered with a hereditary tremor, but in recent years the condition had become noticeably worse, so much so that she required a sling to keep her arm steady during a recent concert.

Anna Maria Whitlock Henry undergoes brain surgery. Image © Stephanie Whitfield

“You know what’s in there and you know what you feel but you just can’t make your body do it any more, and that’s really frustrating,” Henry told local US news station KHOU ahead of her operation. “I can fight it, but I’m tired of doing it – and it is getting worse. I know it’s a matter of either admitting I can’t do it anymore, or doing this so that I can. I’m just very grateful there’s this opportunity to do something about it that my father never had.”

Having decided to bite the bullet,...