Suburban Shaman: Tales From Medicine's Frontline

'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

Chosen as Book of the Week by BBC Radio4

Also available:

Magic in Practice - Introducing Medical NLP: the Art and Science of Language in Healing and Health - ISBN 1905140193
Shadows in Wonderland: a Hospital Odyssey - ISBN 1905140207
Traditional Herbal Medicines: A Guide to Their Safer Use - ISBN 1905140045

Hammersmith Press is an independent publishing house producing books for the general public and health professionals that promote better health and well-being through a greater understanding of the human body and mind, with a particular emphasis on the importance of nutrition and diet.

Some of the areas we publish in include:

-Neuro-linguistic Programming (NLP)
-Overcoming Chronic Fatigue Syndrome
-Natural Health & Weight Loss
-Holistic Medicine
-Thyroid Health
-Medical stories
- Healthy eating
-Traditional medicines
-Infertility
-Menopause
-Diabetes