Suburban Shaman
- tales from medicine's frontline

Winner of MJA General Book of the Year Award 2007

Published 26 January 2006 By Cecil Helman Buy now... 240pp £9.99 ISBN: 1-905140-08-8

'I simply could not put down this extraordinary mixture of stories from the GP's surgery in suburban London. ...Two clear messages emerge from this book, which should be required reading for every medical student. ...First, medicine must relearn its heart and soul...Second, there is no certainty in medicine, and no clear answer as to what it is that cures, or fails to cure people. ...Clearly told, and an extraordinary read, this is a passionate cry for humane medicine.'
Dame Julia Neuberger, The Independent

'This resolutely non-specialist memoir may, I think, turn out to be one of the classics which every medical student MUST read.... I don't think anyone since A. J. Cronin has expressed so strongly what it is to be embedded in the community as a GP.... I love [what it says] in the book about the 'long view', the watching of families, the understanding of family tendencies.... [The book is] also fascinating on professional tendencies and on how the patient presents across the table to a GP.'
Libby Purves, BBC Radio 4 Midweek

'Cecil Helman is many things: old-fashioned general practitioner, psychiatrist, cultural anthropologist, storyteller, poet and artist - and all this comes together in Suburban Shaman, a beautifully written, devastatingly honest, and often very funny, account of an audacious and adventurous life.'
Oliver Sacks, author of Awakenings and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat

'this warm but incisive and beautifully-written book...should inspire every patient, every doctor and perhaps even the occasional politician or National Health Service manager to appreciate the pressing need to restore the humanity of medicine without losing any of its magnificent scientific attainments.'
Times Higher Education Supplement

'Helman has real talent, and the condensed images of himself and his patients are ofter hauntingly lifelike. ...The descriptrions of Cape Town traumas, suburban English lives and the daily collisions between a family doctor and his patients are vivd and immediate.'
Times Literary Supplement

'A warm, humorous and entertaining account of Helman's life as a family doctor with anthropological training. ...[His] thought-provoking accounts provide an example of how anthropological thinking can contribute to popular debate on issues that affect all our lives. ...As the technocrats begin snapping at our heels in this age of 'end users' and virtual fieldwork, we need to take Helman's warning about medicine to heart and apply them to the future of our own discipline.'
Anthropology Today

‘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’.