Ian Williams
Myriad Editions, 2014 PB,
220pp,
£12.99, 978-1908434289
A middle-aged man named Iwan, an ex-heavy metal fan, a cyclist, and a GP. The central figure of Ian Williams’ graphic novel would have a Twitter bio alarmingly close to my own. With the title in mind I approached The Bad Doctor with some trepidation. It is subtitled ‘The troubled life and times of Dr Iwan James’ and we follow Iwan as he consults, worries about being a bad doctor, and struggles to cope with his own obsessive compulsive disorder. His GP experiences with patients and partners are punctuated by cycle rides with his gay mate.
There can’t be many GPs who don’t worry about being bad doctors. And, in truth, we all have days when the complexity seems to run away from us; where even the simple things elude our grasp. General practice is celebrated as an uncertainty sink but that same uncertainty can overwhelm us on the bad days. That’s part of the normal ebb and flow of professional life. General practice forces us to recognise and live with our own foibles. Iwan’s struggle to come to terms with his own self is at the heart of this story. As he says: ‘The doubt is only about myself. I can be objective about patients. I don’t worry about treatment decisions.’
The monochrome images are spare but effective. The graphic novel format offers a richness and depth to this tale; it is a tribute to Williams’ skills that I can’t imagine reading simple prose on this topic. A short essay on burnout wouldn’t have the same effect. A paper on ‘doctors in difficulty’ wouldn’t linger in the mind the way Iwan’s struggles do. More than anything, Iwan James, ‘Bad Doctor’, turns out to be, like all of us, a perfectly normal doctor. In other words just a perfectly normal human being. There is much in this reflective graphic novel to help us all reconcile the personal and professional.
- © British Journal of General Practice 2014
