Cecil Helman – författare

Culture, Health and Illness is the leading international textbook on the role of cultural and social factors in health, illness, and medical care. Since first published in 1984, it has been used in over 40 countries within universities, medical schools and nursing colleges. This new edition meets the ever-growing need for a clear starting point in understanding the clinical significance of cultural and social factors. The book addresses the complex interactions between health, illness and culture by setting out anthropological theory in a highly readable, jargon-free style and integrating this with the practice of health care using real-life examples and case histories.Fully revised throughout, the fifth edition has expanded its coverage of topics that are challenging both the patient and the carer's understanding of health and illness: poverty and inequality of healthcare, genetics, biotechnology, the internet and health, chronic diseases, drug-resistant infections, changes in nutrition and body image, medical care of migrants, medical technology, global pandemics such as AIDS and malaria, drug and alcohol dependence, and patients' 'languages of distress', a complex topic central to the doctor-patient relationship.In today's world of increasing cultural, religious and ethnic diversity of populations, Culture, Health and Illness is essential reading for students of medicine, nursing, psychiatry, public health, health education, international health and medical anthropology, across the globe.

This is a wonderful collection of stories about doctors and patients, including many by world-famous authors who were also physicians, such as Oliver Sacks, Anton Chekhov and Arthur Conan Doyle. Always moving, entertaining and informative, and sometimes troubling, these remarkable stories will appeal to anyone with an interest in health, illness and medical care. They also provide essential core material for those studying doctor-patient communication, the literature of medicine and medical humanities. The stories, some written from the doctor's viewpoint, some from that of the patient, illuminate the warmth and compassion - but also the many problems - in relationships between doctors and patients, both in the past and today. Doctors and Patients: an anthology is enjoyable, fascinating and enlightening - for oneself, and for friends and partners, whether healthcare professionals or interested general readers.

'To be a good doctor you have to be a compassionate chameleon, a shape shifter - a shaman. Even if your adaptation to your patients' world happens at an unconscious level you should always work within their system of ideas, never against it...' So writes Cecil Helman after 27 years as a family practitioner in the suburbs of North London interlaced with training and research as a medical anthropologist, comparing a wide variety of health systems. 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 shared insights into what these stories can teach us about ourselves and our own attitudes to health and illness, whether we are deliverers or recipients of health care.With humour and gentle humaneness, Helman's colourful stories take the reader on a journey from apartheid South Africa, where he did his initial 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 observer of curative trance dances in the favelas of Brazil to consulting with sangomas in South Africa. While trained in the Western tradition and with many years of practice in that system, Helman's anthropological insight leads him to view illness in a wider personal, social and cosmic context, considering elements beyond the purely physical, as do shamans and other traditional doctors. In pleading for this age-old 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'.