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Dr Cecil Helman was born in Cape Town, South
Africa into a medical family, and qualified as a doctor at
the University of Cape Town Medical School. He left South Africa
because of the apartheid system, and then studied
social anthropology at University College London
Over the years he has combined several different
careers into a creative synthesis: family doctor, anthropologist,
university lecturer, writer and poet.
After a brief spell as a ship’s doctor
in the Mediterranean, he worked as a family doctor for 27 years
for the National Health Service, in an around London, combining
his clinical practice with a distinguished academic career. |
His recent memoir Suburban
Shaman: Tales from Medicine’s Frontline’,
was described by Oliver Sacks (author of The Man Who
Mistook His Wife for a Hat) as ‘a beautifully
written, devastatingly honest, and often very funny, account
of an audacious and adventurous life’ It received widespread
critical acclaim, and was given the rare honour of being
selected by the BBC as a ‘Book of the Week’,
and then serialized on BBC Radio in March 2006.
Dr Helman is an international expert on medical
anthropology – the cross-cultural study of health, illness,
and medical care – and on the many different forms of
healthcare and healing found worldwide. He has done research
on primary health care systems, and on traditional healers,
in South Africa, Brazil, and elsewhere.
His textbook Culture, Health and Illness has
been used in more than 40 countries since it was first published
in 1984, including in over 120 universities, medical schools
and nursing colleges in the USA and Canada. He has also published
academic papers in medical journals, including The Lancet, British
Medical Journal, Annals of Internal Medicine, British
Journal of General Practice, and Medical Humanities,
He has received several prestigious international prizes and
awards for his work.
He has been a Visiting Fellow in Social Medicine and Health Policy at
Harvard Medical School; a Visiting Professor in the Multi-cultural Health
Programme at University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia; and Hooker
Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Department of Anthropology, McMaster
University, Ontario, Canada. He has also been a guest lecturer in many
universities, including those of Cambridge, Oxford, London, Durham, Geneva,
Barcelona, Amsterdam, Leuven, and Cape Town, and has given the David Rogers
Health Policy Colloquium at Cornell Medical School in New York, and the
Cabot Lecture at Harvard Medical School.On the literary side, he has published both
non-fiction and fiction, including a memoir, a book of essays
about the body, an anthology of stories about doctors and patients,
a novella, and several books of prose poems. He has always
been fascinated by prose poems, and by their similarity to
traditional myths, legends, allegories and midrashim. His poetry
and other writings have appeared in many anthologies and literary
journals (including London Magazine, Ambit, Paris
Voices and Tikkun), but he has also written for
British Vogue and The Observer Magazine.
Dr Helman lives in Britain, but re-visits
South Africa frequently, and is currently working on a sequel
to Suburban Shaman. He lectures to medical students,
doctors, and nurses, teaches courses on cross-cultural health
care, and has run creative writing courses for doctors. He
is particularly interested in the humanistic side of medicine
- especially the role of stories and narratives in medical
care, and what they reveal about the inner worlds of both doctor
and patient. Among his other interests are the role of metaphors
and symbols in our understanding of the human body, in both
illness and health; and what the Western industrialized world
can learn from the healing systems of more traditional societies,
when dealing with different aspects of human suffering. |
