Suburban Shaman

Book excerpt: 'To be a good doctor you have to be a compassionate chameleon, a shapehifter - a shaman. Even if your adaptation to your patients' world happenst an unconscious level you should always work within their system of ideas,ever against it...' So writes Cecil Helman after 27 years as a familyractitioner in the suburbs of North London interlaced with training andesearch as a medical anthropologist, comparing a wide variety of healthystems. This unique combination of frontline health worker and detachedcademic informs the many stories that make up this fascinating book. It alsonforms the author's shared insights into what these stories can teach usbout ourselves and our own attitudes to health and illness, whether we areeliverers or recipients of health care.;With humour and gentle humaneness,elman's colourful stories take the reader on a journey from apartheid Southfrica, where he did his initial training, to the London of the early 1970s,here for a short time he foreswore medicine to become an anthropologist andoet; from ship's doctor on a Mediterranean cruise to family practitioner in