Monday, July 24, 2017

Feeling Good With Kriota Wilberg

Kriota Willberg teaches anatomy and has drawn amusing comics for cartoonists on how to avoid work-related injuries. She's since branched out and done a lot of comics about a subject rich in material: the history of medicine. The Wandering Uterus, for example, is a heavily-researched, lushly-illustrated account of the phenomenon where doctors believed that any pain a woman felt was caused by their uterus literally wandering around their body. There's a hilarious quote from Plato wherein he describes the uterus as being an animal that gets angry if it's not making babies. Later, more modern medicine used foul-smelling scents to drive the uterus away from the head to help with headaches, or fragrant herbs to entice it back to to the pelvis. There's a recurring punchline from the anonymous woman who's looking for pain relief: "Any system in use for centuries must be safe and effective", as the most ridiculous "remedies" are applied. Willberg's critique here is not so much of the science at the time, but of the lack of rigor scientists used. They didn't actually listen to the patient (something that still frequently happens to women today) and gather data, nor did they actually pay attention to results. Integrative and holistic medicine techniques are fine when they actually show verifiable results; quackery is a result of putting one's prejudices ahead of the data.

In Zoonosis And Tipsy Nephrologists & At Least We Have Our Health!, Willberg goes the gag strip route, including a series of gags about why one might think twice about petting the cat (toxoplasmosis, bubonic plague, ringworm, rabies, etc) with drawings that are hilarious and descriptions that are positively unnerving. The first zine also has lots of specialty-specific gags, wherein a drunk oncologist or orthopedist is trying to pronounce an especially difficult word while soused. The latter comic has tons of New Yorker-style gags (including the style of drawing, use of grayscale and captions underneath each strip) with punchlines that require some specific scientific knowledge in order to understand. Happily, Willberg provides "Humor Analysis" for each gag, which in itself is a pretty funny deconstruction of the oft-inscrutable New Yorker gags. Some of the strips find Willberg just trying to create a rhyme with medical drawings, like the range of cell degeneration that can lead to cancer, and the latter word rhyming with dancer. Willberg is a playful cartoonist and writer who chuckles at her own less-successful attempts at rhymes and gags, disarming the reader as they understand that she's figuring this out as she goes along.

It's important to remember just how skilled Willberg is as a medical illustrator, and she often finds ways to juxtapose that skill with cartooning and storytelling. Anatomical Triangles Of The Neck takes a variety of muscular and neurological "triangles" (important for surgeons), which Willberg rearranges into love triangles. It's actually a funny and convoluted mnemonic, as she assigns the letters used to abbreviate anatomical structures to names. Pictorial Anatomy Of The Cute takes drawings of highly cute kittens and provides cutaway drawings of muscular, skeletal and neurological structures. It's both funny and unsettling, but mostly it's a way of reminding the reader that all animals are flesh and bone. The contrast with the otherwise adorable drawings and poses only serves to highlight this reminder.

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