#237: Doctor Doctor

Some books are just too funny, even unintentionally.  Don't ask me why I have a copy of Bailey & Lowe's Short Practice Of Surgery on my shelves, but if you must know then I was a Boy Scout and we were always told to 'Be Prepared'.  Mind you a few of us were fiddled as kids, but that's another story.

I first learnt about this book via the pages of Graham Chapman's A Liar's Autobiography.  Chapman, who was actually a fully qualified doctor as well as a damned funny guy, makes reference to this book and describes it as being anything but a laugh a minute, with the exception of the two images that are shown here, the first of which is described as being a 'quick giggle'.  Monty Python clearly has a lot to answer for and the levels of their perversion and subversion ran deeper than they might have thought.  Good on 'em.  From such subversion people learn to be subversive themselves and affect change from within.

And that's where true power and protest works.  Protesting on the streets really doesn't achieve a lot, you need to ingrate yourself within the system and begin to make the changes, subtle and otherwise.  To effect real change through protest then you need to follow it up with more concrete methods, such as strikes and other stop work or blocking of service.  Otherwise all you have are a few people wandering the streets, having their names noted by departments, standing in the heat listening to a lot of empty rhetoric.

Sad.  But then on the other side of the coin, we do have images like these to chuckle over, so giggle away!