People's History of the NHS

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Cartoon about dingy GP surgeries

This cartoon portrays the GP surgery as a dingy, dark and unattractively decorated space. It states: ‘Mrs Evans tells me that her doctor’s got an Al Read show [popular radio comedian] to brighten his surgery’. (Ronald Carl Giles, Sunday Express, 3 October 1954, in British Cartoon Archive).


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One thought on “Cartoon about dingy GP surgeries

  1. It’s interesting you interpreted this as a cartoon portraying GP surgeries as dingy, unwelcoming places. I took it to be about the surgery waiting room as a social space, where old biddies go to socialise and even be entertained. Punch and Judy vs Al Read suggesting GPs competing for patients perhaps. Generally there seems to be a theme in the Giles cartoons of a sort of self-interested customer mentality battling the idealistic postwar settlement, so I saw this as an example of that rather than dinginess.

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