The Bad Doctor is Very Good Comic
Thursday, 7 April 2016 07:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jesse_the_kThe Bad Doctor—Ian Williams
http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/883570454
ISBN 978-0-271-06754-4
I love this graphic novel to bits. The art is simple, even sparse, yet skillful: every line matters. The artist conveys age, mood, class with one or two strokes. The book details the daily grind of Iwan James, an NHS doctor serving a small Welsh community. Privacy is limited, patients are predictable, and he must treat even the ones that he loathes. He looks forward to cycling the countryside with his pal. Events in his childhood don't fade away. The Bad Doctor brought home that doctors are actually human beings. Unfortunately for all of us, docs are supposed to submerge that humanity. Williams illustrates the high cost of silence and suppression.
http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/883570454
ISBN 978-0-271-06754-4
I love this graphic novel to bits. The art is simple, even sparse, yet skillful: every line matters. The artist conveys age, mood, class with one or two strokes. The book details the daily grind of Iwan James, an NHS doctor serving a small Welsh community. Privacy is limited, patients are predictable, and he must treat even the ones that he loathes. He looks forward to cycling the countryside with his pal. Events in his childhood don't fade away. The Bad Doctor brought home that doctors are actually human beings. Unfortunately for all of us, docs are supposed to submerge that humanity. Williams illustrates the high cost of silence and suppression.
In addition to wrangling the Graphic Medicine site, working on a new book, and traveling to conferences, Williams' wry cartoon "Sick Note" appears weekly in the Guardian:
http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/series/sick-notes
Earlier Williams published as "Thom Ferrier." Thom gets the credit for this very creepy domestic story of "Roy's Secret D.I.Y. project."
http://www.thebaddr.com/roy/4586717572
Read if ... You're curious about mundane details of an NHS doctor's life, recreational cycling, OCD, or life in Wales.
Avoid if ... You dislike satanic panic, suicidal ideation, or enactments of OCD
Author website: http://www.myriadeditions.com/creator/ian-williams/
available in print, PDF, Sequential format for iPad
(no subject)
Date: 08/04/2016 06:52 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 08/04/2016 03:32 pm (UTC)Social panic, US flavor. Mid 1980s, several day care centers were closed down following accusations of Satanic ritual abuse. The most famous, tried twice, was the McMartin Preschool trial, detailed here by a law professor:
http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/mcmartin/mcmartin.html
Fallout still drips:
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/day-care-operator-convicted-of-satanic-child-abuse-released/
And true believers still exist:
https://ritualabuse.us/ritualabuse/studies/satanic-ritual-abuse-evidence-with-information-on-the-mcmartin-preschool-case/
Among other contributing causes, I think the Satanic panic was an ideological wrestling match between "believe the children, attend to the survivor" and "children/women are inherently unreliable witnesses, because they're emotional."
Therapists who specialized in ritual abuse would interview (& sometimes hypnotize) very young children and the therapists' testimony was used to arrest & try the perpetrators. More recently scientists have learned more about how humans are exceptionally good at believing the stories we tell ourselves. It also occasioned very nasty arguments about "false memory syndrome,"
http://www.fmsfonline.org/?newsupdate=newsupdates
eventually discrediting therapists who hypnotized their patients and "discovered"
the Satanic and plain-old-family abuse.
Given that history, I'm truly amazed that the former kids abused by Catholic priests were listened to, and eventually, believed in.
(no subject)
Date: 08/04/2016 05:59 pm (UTC)