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The Bad Doctor book cover
The Bad Doctor
2014
First Published
3.72
Average Rating
224
Number of Pages

Part of Series

Cartoonist and doctor Ian Williams introduces us to the troubled life of Dr Iwan James, as all humanity, it seems, passes through his surgery door. Incontinent old ladies, men with eagle tattoos, traumatised widowers – Iwan’s patients cause him both empathy and dismay, as he tries to do his best in a world of limited time and budgetary constraints, and in which there are no easy answers. His feelings for his partners also cause him grief: something more than friendship for the sympathetic Dr Lois Pritchard, and not a little frustration at the prankish and obstructive Dr Robert Smith. Iwan’s cycling trips with his friend Arthur provide some welcome relief, but even the landscape is imbued with his patients’ distress. As we explore the phantoms from Iwan’s past, we too begin to feel compassion for The Bad Doctor, and ask what is the dividing line between patient and provider? Wry, comic, graphic, from the humdrum to the tragic, his patients’ stories are the spokes that make Iwan’s wheels go round in this humane and eloquently drawn account of a doctor’s life.

Avg Rating
3.72
Number of Ratings
702
5 STARS
19%
4 STARS
43%
3 STARS
31%
2 STARS
7%
1 STARS
1%
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Author

Ian Williams
Ian Williams
Author · 3 books
Ian Williams is a comics artist, writer and doctor who lives in Brighton. His graphic novel, The Bad Doctor, was published in 2014 and followed up in 2019 by The Lady Doctor. Both were critically acclaimed and he is working on his third, for the same publishers, provisionally entitled The Sick Doctor, which will be published in 2022. He studied Fine Art after medical school and then became involved in the Medical Humanities movement. He named the area of study called Graphic Medicine, building the eponymous website in 2007, which he currently co-edits. He is Founder of the not-for-profit Graphic Medicine International Cooperative and co-author of the Eisner-nominated Graphic Medicine Manifesto. He has been the recipient of several grants has contributed to numerous medical, humanities, and comics publications, has sat on the board of a number of arts and humanities organisations and is currently an affiliated researcher to the Centre for Memory, Narrative and Histories at the University of Brighton. Between May 2015 and January 2017 he drew a weekly comic strip, Sick Notes, for The Guardian.
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