'Suburban Shaman' - BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week

Links:

bbc.co.uk/radio4/bookoftheweek" target="_self">BBC Book of the Week
'Surburban Shaman'

Dr Cecil Helman

The memoir of UCL academic Dr Cecil Helman (UCL Primary Care & Population Sciences) has been named BBC Radio 4 'Book of the Week' for 6 March 2006. 'Suburban Shaman - Tales From Medicine's Frontline' draws on his own experience and career to reflect on health and illness within the context of community, tradition and history.

After completing a medical degree in his native South Africa, Dr Helman first came to UCL to study social anthropology, a subject that had long fascinated him. But it wasn't until he went on a trip to the USA that he discovered that he could combine his two subjects of study through medical anthropology, a new and marginal discipline back in the early 1970s.

Dr Helman then took up a Fellowship to Harvard Medical School in 1983, afterwards returning to the UCL to become Senior Lecturer in Primary Care. Since 1990 he has also been Professor of Medical Anthropology at Brunel University. While concurrently working part-time as a GP in north London, Dr Helman conducted research into the prevalence of the British folk belief ('Feed a cold, starve a fever'), the first of many research studies into lay beliefs about health and illness, both in the UK and abroad.

Dr Helman went on to write 'Culture, Health and Illness' in 1984, a guide to culturally competent medical care which has become the standard international textbook on the subject, and is now in its fourth edition. Aimed at a more general readership,  'Suburban Shaman' gives a personal perspective on the subjects that have continued to fascinate him.

Filled with anecdotes from his career, 'Suburban Shaman' shows how medicine is not just about science, but about the stories of patients and doctors, and the intermingling of their lives.

Dr Helman's stories take the reader on a journey from apartheid South Africa, to the London of the early 1970s, 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".

Speaking of 'Suburban Shaman', renowned neurologist and writer Oliver Sacks writes: "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."

An extract from Dr Helman's book will be read on Radio 4 FM daily during the week starting from 6 March 2006. To find out more about the Radio 4 programme, 'Suburban Shaman' or Dr Helman's work, use the links at the top of this article.