Suburban Shaman: Tales From Medicine's Frontline

by Cecil G. Helman

'Medicine is not just about science. It's also all about stories, and about the mingling of narratives among doctors, and between them and their patients.'
So writes Cecil Helman after 27 years as a family practitioner in and around London interlaced with training and research as a medical anthropologist, comparing a wide variety of medical systems and other forms of healing.

This unique combination of frontline health worker and detached academic informs the many stories that make up this fascinating book. It also informs the author's insights into what human suffering can teach us about ourselves and our own attitudes to health and illness, whether we are deliverers or recipients of health care.

With insight and compassion, Dr Helman's stories take the reader on a journey from apartheid South Africa, where he did his medical training, to the London of the early 1970s, where for a short time he foreswore medicine to become an anthropologist and poet; from ship's doctor on a Mediterranean cruise to family practitioner in London; from observing curative trance dances in the favelas of Brazil to interviewing sangomas in South Africa.

While trained in the Western tradition and with many years of practice in that system, Dr Helman's anthropological insight leads him to view illness in a wider personal, social and cultural context, considering elements beyond the purely physical. In pleading for this holistic approach he celebrates family medicine which 'in its quiet and unassuming way, and every day of the week, is still at the very frontline of human suffering'.

Winner of the 2007 Medical Journalists Association Book Award in the 'general readership' section

Genres: Medicine, Nonfiction, Memoir

Paperback

First published January 27, 2006

Reviews

[Dorothy]

Enjoyed reading these short essays written by a GP trained in South Africa but worked Suburban London, England. The author also trained in anthropology and this study and his interest in other cultures informs his work as a doctor. He has much to say about the de-personalisation of medicine as practised in many hospitals and reminds practitioners that the body needs to be treated holistically in order to heal.

[Michele]

Read this book quite a few years back, but it made an impression on me. Too many times we heal people by changing them, their values, their beliefs, everything familiar to them. Yet, Cecil Helman tells how it is much better to work with, and within the patient's person to effect real healing.

[Phoebe Chan]

Love the comment that "The art of medicine is to amuse the patient while nature heals itself"

[Giskin]

Helman was a medical anthropologist as well a GP. These autobiographical accounts tell of his rich career and memorable patients.