Cecil Helman - An Amazing Murmur of the Heart: Feeling the Patients Beat

First published in 2014 by Hammersmith Health Books an imprint of Hammersmith Books Limited
14 Greville Street, London EC1N 8SB, UK
www.hammersmithbooks.co.uk

2014, Dr Zoe Helman

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in any retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying , recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers and copyright holder.

Authors note
Where the Author has included case histories, descriptions of patients, or dialogue, usually recreated from memory after many years or even decades, he has taken considerable care in each case to protect the identity of the people involved. He has changed a variety of medical, personal, historical and other identifying details, including sometimes the time, place and circumstances of the encounter in some cases blending similar stories together. Despite this occasional but very necessary fictionalisation to protect identity, every single one of the case histories is based originally on real people and on real events. The Author was very grateful to the people concerned, and hoped he described them with the respect and compassion that they deserve. He was also confident that anyone who thinks they recognise themselves in a case history will be mistaken, for he has deliberately selected stories that are in some ways archetypal, with each one representing many hundreds of very similar cases that would be familiar to any family doctor, in almost every practice in the land.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data: A CIP record of this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN (print edition): 9781781610190
ISBN (ebook): 9781781610206

Commissioning editor: Georgina Bentliff
Designed and typeset by: Julie Bennett, Bespoke Publishing Ltd
Production by: Helen Whitehorn, Path Projects Ltd
Printed and bound by: TJ International Ltd, UK
Cover illustration by: Christopher Hoare

It was a great honour for Hammersmith Press to publish Cecil Helmans Suburban Shaman in 2006. With the help of publicist Pam Solomon, it was widely and positively reviewed and read on BBC Radio 4 as Book of the Week.

Even before it was published, Cecil was working on this second collection of medical stories and the general issues about medical practice and contemporary medical training that they prompted. He read from both collections at literary events between 2006 and 2009, but increasingly he had to ask others to read for him as his throat was giving him trouble the first signs of the motor neurone disease that was eventually to kill him.

Cecil died in June 2009 just as retirement from research and teaching was offering the opportunity to write full time. This was a great loss to us all. Thankfully he entrusted An Amazing Murmur of the Heart, his final manuscript, to his daughter Zoe, and his close friends Clive Sinclair and Doron Swade. Hammersmith Books is now delighted to publish it as both a print and an ebook an option that was only in its infancy when Cecil died. These stories remind us of Cecils humanity as a doctor and his erudition and breadth of vision as a writer aspects of himself that he would hope to pass on to all who read his last book.

Dr Cecil Helman was born in Cape Town, South Africa, into a family of doctors and artists. He studied medicine there during the apartheid era before moving to the UK, where he studied anthropology at University College London.

After a spell as a ships doctor, he became a family practitioner in London while also developing a distinguished academic career, focusing on the cross-cultural study of health, illness and medical care a specialism he largely established. He was a Visiting Fellow in Social Medicine and Health Policy at Harvard Medical School and a Visiting Professor in the Multi-cultural Health Programme at the University of New South Wales. He retired from clinical practice in 2002 but continued his academic work, being Professor of Medical Anthropology at Brunel University and Senior Lecturer in the Department of Primary Care & Population Sciences, Royal Free & University College Medical School, London, UK until his death in 2009. His leading textbook, Culture, Health and Illness is now in its fifth edition, published by CRC Press, and has been translated into many other languages.

In recognition of his pioneering achievements, Cecil received two major international awards for his work:

• the Career Achievement Award of the American Anthropological Association (2004), and
• the Lucy Mair Medal for Applied Anthropology of the Royal Anthropological Institute (2005).

In addition to his academic achievements, Cecil was a talented writer of stories, prose poems and essays. The autobiographical Suburban Shaman was published in 2009 to great acclaim. For it he won the Royal College of General Practitioners Abercrombie Medal for an outstanding contribution to the literature of general practice and the Book of the Year award from the Society of Medical Writers in 2007. An Amazing Murmur of the Heart is published posthumously, following his death from motor neurone disease in June 2009.

Spending time with Cecil was like being in one of his books. He gave much thought and meaning to everyday experience and, always the enquiring and informed observer, would reveal his quizzical insights when one least expected it. [He] was a generous man, always helpful and encouraging of others projects and growth.

From Gerald Marss obituary of Cecil Helman, The Guardian