The Bad Doctor
The Troubled Life and Times of Dr Iwan James
An eye-opener into what happens behind the doctor's desk, Scrupulosity takes a stethoscope to Dr Iwan James, a GP in a small rural market town, who is in need of are himself. Incontinent old ladies, men with eagle tattoos, traumatised widowers — his dismay at the sufferings of his patients is further confounded by unrequited longing for his colleague, Dr Lois Pritchard, and their backstabbing partner, Dr Robert Smith, who will use any means to make Iwan look bad in her presence. Haunted since childhood by 'scrupulosity', a moral or religious form of obsessive compulsive disorder, Iwan's only relief from the pains of practice and patients are his cycling trips with his friend and mentor, Arthur. Wry, comic, graphic, often quotidian and sometimes tragic, his patients' stories are the spokes that make Iwan's wheels go round.
Ian Williams is a comics artist, doctor and writer, now living in Brighton. He has studied Medicine, Medical Humanities and Fine Art and he founded the website GraphicMedicine.org, coining the term that has been applied to the interaction between the medium of comics and the discourse of healthcare.
Born of a Welsh family, Williams grew up in the north of England and studied Medicine in Cardiff before moving to North Wales, where he lived for over twenty years, to pursue his love of mountaineering. He worked as a doctor while developing a side career as a painter and printmaker, exhibiting nationally and internationally. He undertook an MA in Medical Humanities and wrote a dissertation on medical narrative in comics and graphic novels.
Williams’s attempt to find some common ground between his two careers led to the creation of his own comic strips in 2007, using the nom de plume ‘Thom Ferrier’ to maintain some anonymity while still working in rural general practice.
Populated by a cast of flawed characters, and shot through with gallows humour, his stories explore the darker side of medicine, revealing the harsh realities of human interaction and behaviour during times of stress and fear. The Bad Doctor, his debut graphic novel (Myriad, 2014), was highly commended by the British Medical Association at the Medical Book Awards 2015. His latest graphic novel, The Lady Doctor, was published by Myriad in January 2019.
He is also the author of a series of comic strips for The Guardian. Sick Notes is a weekly cartoon about the trials and tribulations of working within the NHS.
He is a joint Series Editor for the Graphic Medicine list by Penn State University Press, US publishers of The Bad Doctor.
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