A View from the Head End: Medical Cartoons to Ease the Pain

Abstract

S. Yentis tfm Publishing Ltd , ISBN: 1903378 42 7 , Price: £14.95, 128 pp Some people just make you sick. Steve Yentis has written more papers than most mere mortal anaesthetists have read, all of them informative and articulate, many of them ground-breaking. He is the author of that indispensable exam-time tome ‘Anaesthesia and Intensive Care A-Z’. He is an internationally renowned speaker, an ethics maven, Honorary Secretary of the Obstetric Anaesthetists Association, an editor of Anaesthesia, and a member of the editorial board of at least one other journal. It now seems that he is a talented cartoonist as well. Many of the cartoons which make up this book were, in his own words ‘drawn between cases’. An elderly colleague once told me that, had he practised the violin regularly while waiting for his surgeon, he would by now have reached virtuoso standard. I just tend to twiddle my thumbs and seethe quietly: Yentis picks up his pen and draws. Some of these cartoons have already seen the light of day, brightening the pages of ‘The Primary FRCA: A Complete Guide to Preparation and Passing’, but the great majority are newly minted. They are subdivided very loosely into themed chapters, but all share a recognisably anaesthetic sense of humour (an anaesthetist explains to a recumbent patient: ‘I’ll just inject a knock-out drug and connect you to a life-support machine, then brave surgeons will battle against all odds to perform life-saving wonder-surgery'). At their best, they are reminiscent of the great James Thurber (two dogs in tiny cages on the research lab shelf: One says ‘Personally I’ll be sorry to see the end of diethyl ether'). They range from the state of the NHS (an ODP helpless with laughter, saying: ‘You want to use WHAT?’) to handling the modern empowered patient (‘I’d like to ask for your permission now to seek informed consent…'). All of anaesthetic life is there: indeed, those of us who know the artist well might even worry whether we might have inspired the odd gag – the lecturer saying ‘I think you’ll find the next slide especially interesting because of the way I've blended a two-tone pink background with graduated vermillion running title, and crimson sans-serif 24 point text with intermittent strikethrough' looks horribly familiar. Yentis explains in the foreword that these cartoons are presented as drawn – whether on glove packets or non-vital bits of patient notes. This gives them a rough, naif, feel but adds to their immediacy and impact. He will forgive me if I say that, unlike his other books, this is not an essential addition to the departmental library. It will, however, make a great stocking-filler for an anaesthetic – or even surgical – colleague.