10 • Profi le


GRAPHIC MEDICINE


Adam Campbell meets a GP with a special interest like no other W


HEN I ask GP-cum-debut graphic novelist Dr Ian Williams how his colleagues, friends and family have responded to his new book, The Bad Doctor, he says:


“I just thought, when the book comes out and they read it, they’re going to think I’m completely crackers.” Creative, talented, ambitious even… but


crackers? It’s not as implausible as it may sound. As a medical student in Cardiff , Ian suff ered from obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) and developed irrational fears which led him to adopt a series of odd rituals, such as avoiding certain “taboo areas” of the city he came to associate with bad luck. He told no one about it – not family, not friends and especially not fellow students – for fear he would be ridiculed and perhaps even turfed out of university.


But nearly three decades later his secret is out. These experiences, combined with those of being a GP in a rural north Wales practice, have helped to inform his highly amusing graphic novel featuring Dr Iwan James, a GP with OCD. And as part of his promotional work for the book Ian has outed himself as a former OCD suff erer – not least in the national press in an article for the Independent newspaper. “Until I started making comics in 2007, I had


never told anybody about having had OCD when I was younger. I hid it the best I could when I was in medical school. You just didn’t admit to any illness or failure and you especially didn’t admit to any sort of, mental health problems,” says the 48-year-old who lives in Brighton, and now splits his time between being a GP and a comic artist. Well, as he realised some time ago when he


sought professional help, crackers he’s not – and the response so far to his tale of Iwan’s troubled life and times, not to mention those of the community of pensioners, obsessives and gun nuts who attend his surgery, has been


positive all round. “The senior partner where I work said, ‘I bought the book and you know I really like it, it’s fantastic.’” He laughs as he adds: “That is not to say that there aren’t loads of people out there thinking that they would never give me a job in medicine!” Flaws, failure, illness and self-revelation are


all a kind of currency in the indie comics scene, explains Ian, and this was part of the reason he was attracted to the form in the fi rst place. “Although strips or graphic novels may be fi ctional with an autobiographical streak, comic artists aim for an emotional honesty, basically to tell the truth through story.”


Making comics But there was a good deal of ground to cover – medical, artistic and otherwise – before his eureka moment. His fi rst move was to rural Wales, partly to get away from the urban scene that had featured so prominently in his OCD and partly to pursue his hobbies of climbing and mountain biking – an adrenaline antidote, perhaps, to the disabling cautiousness of OCD. Little did he know that working as a GP there he was starting to store up some of the many tales from the surgery that would later populate his graphic novel. In the meantime, Ian began to develop his artistic side, pursuing an interest in painting. Before long, he began to exhibit and sell his work and by 1999 he decided to go part-time as a GP and enrol in a postgraduate certifi cate in Fine Art at Chester. “I built up a sort of side career as a painter and printmaker. I sold work through galleries and actually made a bit of money doing that.” But all the time he was looking for a way to bridge the divide between medicine and art, not wanting to ditch one or the other. “I felt that the two sides of my career were split. So I did a part-time MA in medical humanities in Swansea. While I was doing that I realised that the link for me lay not in painting or


printmaking but in comics. I was reading lots of graphic novels and I found a couple that dealt with illness. Specifi cally the one that changed it for me was Mom’s Cancer by Brian Fies. And I realised I wanted to write about illness in graphic novels.” Now he did what “doctors are prone to


doing”, he says with a laugh. “After I had been writing about it for some time I thought, ‘Well I could do that.’” So he created a nom de plume for himself, Thom Ferrier, to maintain some anonymity while still continuing to work part-time as a GP, and began to make comics.


Personal view of illness The strips he made were blackly humorous and with the air of the confessional. In one, Ferrier admits that as a young boy he used to vandalise his neighbour’s house. In another he comes out as having been a “sensitive child” who, later, during his medical training, became a serial fainter in “blood and guts” lectures and practicals.


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