On Doctor's Calls
Posted on: Sunday, 21 October 2007, 15:00 CDT
By SHIELS, Rosa
SUBURBAN SHAMAN: TALES FROM MEDICINE'S FRONTLINE by Cecil Helman. Steele Roberts, 208pp, $29.99. Reviewed by Rosa Shiels.
With glowing praise by internationally renowned neurologist- author Oliver Sachs (The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat, Awakenings) and a foreword by New Zealand's doctor-poet, Glenn Colquhoun, this slim book calls you inside immediately.
Once there, there are many treasures, both observational and literary, to be had.
Born in Cape Town, Cecil Helman is a doctor, anthropologist and writer, who comes from a long line of medical men, going back two centuries to an ancestor who was a barber-surgeon and to his father who served as a psychiatrist in South African state hospitals.
You know you are in for an honest eyewitness account of both medicine and society from the early chapters. In chapter three, Side- show, he describes his hospital experiences as a medical student during the apartheid era. The Population Registration Act of 1950 has divided the country down racial lines into what Helman calls a "pigmentocracy", and he describes with increasing horror the differences meted out to patients of various shades and how some of his contemporaries behave: a radical friend rebels by swapping thermometers from black rectums into lily-white mouths; non-white medical students are forbidden from dissecting white cadavers; black patients are given more "culturally appropriate" diets and are experimented more freely upon.
Then in 1967, his finals year, the light of the world shines down upon his training hospital when Christiaan Barnard carries out the world's first heart-transplant operation there.
He writes: "The operation teaches me the enormous power of language, for the surgeon has strayed into a landscape of metaphors, where the `heart' is seen not just as a muscular pump, but also as a universal symbol for emotion, courage, intimacy and will."
Helman's honesty of observation and interest in people as human beings -- with feelings and extended families, rather than just bodies full of interesting diseases -- led him away from the restrictions of South African life and out into the world. "Once it was the catechism of the Latin names of muscles or the cranial nerves that fascinated me. But now it's the names of the tribes themselves -- the Ndembu, the Azande, the Mai-Enga, the Khoi-Khoi, the Arapahoe, the Yaqui "
After leaving South Africa he moved to Britain and studied anthropology, then worked as a ship's doctor for a while before becoming a GP in London.
His keen eye for the peculiarities of institutional practice and the foibles and failings of humanity, combined with his lively way with words, make Helman's book a pleasure to read, whether you are interested more in medicine or human nature.
Helman's approach to medicine has always been holistic, and as such he is deeply interested in traditional healing and keeps an open mind towards shamanic healing practices.
He writes of "possession" and brain tumours, physical and psychic disease, pills and placebos, germs and spirits; about working behind a mask, delivering babies, writing poetry as a hippie in London, the woman with silverfish in her urine, old men trading in Prozac, witch doctors, surgeons and Sigmund Freud -- and always with sensitivity and humour.
Over the years, Cecil Helman, whose textbook has been used in more than 42 countries, has undertaken various visiting fellowships in social medicine and health policy at international medical schools and universities. He recently received the Career Achievement Award of the American Anthropological Association and the Lucy Mair Medal for Applied Anthropology of the Royal Anthropological Institute.
His book is a taste of his rich life's experiences in medicine.
* Rosa Shiels is a feature writer at The Press.
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(c) 2007 Press, The; Christchurch, New Zealand. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.
Source: Press, The; Christchurch, New Zealand
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