An Amazing Murmur of the Heart

'An Amazing Murmur of the Heart: Feeling the Patient's Beat' is the new book by the late Cecil Helman; GP, award-winning anthropologist, best-selling author, and mesmerizing story-teller. Through the countless stories and anecdotes about his patients and colleagues, he draws a lively picture of today’s NHS, the medical profession in general and, widening the field of vision even further, of contemporary society.A question constantly emerging from Cecil Helman’s stories is ‘but where has the patient gone?’ A new breed of doctors is coming to the fore; in the author’s words, ‘the techno-doctor. This highly skilled individual is often someone with an overriding obsession with technology, and usually a super-specialist with an interest in only a small area of the body. A doctor who sees the body merely as a repairable machine, rather than as part of a suffering person – a machine that can best be diagnosed, and then treated, only by other machines.’