'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.’