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Comedy

Comedy films, books, and cartoons have been produced about the NHS. These have shaped as well as reflected how people think about this institution.

Cartoons

There have been lots of cartoons about the NHS throughout the institution's history. Even before the NHS was launched, there were cartoons documenting the political debates about its form. In the 1940s, the British Medical Association was opposed to the idea of doctors becoming state employees on fixed salaries. Cartoonists made their opinions about this conflict known. David Low published a cartoon in the Evening Standard on the 14 December 1944 showing Charles Hill, the BMA Secretary, being examined by a doctor. The doctor states, 'Don't be alarmed. Whatever's the trouble, you're not going to die from enlargement of the social conscience.'

When the NHS was launched, many cartoons showed how people responded to the NHS being free at the point of access. One cartoon, published in 1951 by Antonia Yeoman, portrayed women in a doctor's waiting room, one of whom stated that she had seen eighteen doctors and seven psychiatrists. Eventually, she had been diagnosed with a 'deep-seated guilt about getting things free from the National Health Service.' Analysing cartoons about health featured in Punch magazine from 1948, the historian Bernard Zeitlyn argues that they 'centred on the bonanza of free spectacles, beards and trips abroad' that the NHS would bring. Cartoonists also portrayed public excitement about the availability of free wigs on the NHS. In one such example, from January 1949, cartoonist Joseph Lee showed an irate man chasing a child, asking, 'Who's been practising Home Perms on my free National Health Service wig?'

Cartoons were also used to criticise NHS policy. From 1948, Zeitlyn also found cartoons portraying concern about the 'bureaucratic consequences' of the NHS. The number of critical cartoons about NHS policy increased from the 1960s, as the NHS faced cuts, and the satire movement emerged in Britain. In December 1960, cartoonist Victor Weisz drew an image for the Evening Standard showing Minister for Health Enoch Powell as a surgeon covered in blood, accusing him of making too many cuts. Other cartoonists suggested that too much was being spent on the NHS. For example in the Daily Mail in 1968, John Musgrave-Wood drew a man to portray the NHS, who was wearing a dunce's cap and being fed 'Defence Cuts'. Many cartoons have been very interested in portraying NHS staff, both their lives and industrial conflict. The cartoonist Carl Giles, who often drew for the Daily Express, was very interested in drawing nurses in particular. Historian Jack Saunders has argued that Giles' presentation shifted from presenting nurses from 'caring and sexualised' to 'bolshie and assertive'. Giles sent a cartoon of nurses stealing peas from patients directly to the East Suffolk Nurses League. On the cartoon, Giles wrote 'with deepest sympathy', referring to the cutting of food allowances.

Everyday humour

Patients and staff have made jokes about the NHS to one another, on a daily basis, throughout time. However, it is very hard to locate and to understand these. Sometimes 'everyday' jokes about the NHS are mentioned in passing in newspaper coverage. For example, one letter published by the Daily Mail in October 1988 described the experiences of an NHS secretary who 'seethed with anger' when hearing a consultant joke about spending his days on a golf course. The People's History of the NHS project at the University of Warwick has collected more such memories on its website, and invites contributions for more.

Researchers and clinicians hope that humour and laughter may be able to be used to improve human health. The term 'gelotology', to denote the study of laughter, was created in 1964 by Edith Trager and W. F. Fry. One experiment from 2011, led by researchers at the University of Oxford, suggested that watching comedy videos may raise people's pain thresholds, when watched in a group. This effect did not hold when videos were watched alone, or if research participants watched videos such as scenes of nature. In 2003, the artist Nicola Green and film-maker Lara Agnew created a 'laughter booth' at the Royal Brompton Hospital. In this booth, patients and staff could watch videos of people laughing. The idea of laughter as healing has also influenced language, through the phrase 'laughter is the best medicine'.