Trust Us, We’re Doctors
August 4th, 2025 Barry Posted in Becky Hawkins collaborations, Fat Acceptance, Health care, History | No Comments »
This cartoon is by me and Becky Hawkins.
TRANSCRIPT OF CARTOON
This cartoon has six panels. Each panel has a large caption at top, indicating the date.
PANEL 1 – 1850
Three people in 1850s clothing, two women and a man with a fantastic mustache, sit at a table. A tray in front of them is piled high with wafers.
MAN: Dr Simm’s Arsenic Wafers will safely make you slender and beautiful! Trust me, I’m a doctor!
PANEL 2 – 1912
A doctor in a white lab coat talks to us. He stands with his arm around a gigantic tapeworm, which is about as tall as he is.
DOCTOR: You just swallow tapeworm eggs. These sweet creatures are nature’s path to slimness!
TAPEWORM: What could go wrong?
PANEL 3 – 1928
A man in a tux lights a cigarette for a glamourous woman in a flapper-style dress.
MAN: Light a Lucky Strike and you’ll never miss sweets that make you fat!
PANEL 4 – 1975
A doctor in a white lab coat grins at us as he holds up a pill bottle. Behind him, a beautiful woman sleeps on a bed.
DOCTOR: Sedatives! Sleep twenty hours a day and you won’t be eating! Nothing could be healthier!
PANEL 5 – 1996
A man talks to us while holding up a Time Magazine cover. The cover shows the body of a slim woman in a bathing suit, with the caption “Hot New Diet Pill.”
MAN: It’s called Fen-Phen! What a fun name, right? You’ll lose weight and it definitely probably maybe won’t cause heart attacks!
PANEL 6- TODAY
A doctor holds up a syringe, as he talks to us with a grin.
DOCTOR: Just inject once weekly for the rest of your life and you’ll stop wanting to eat. Totally safe! Trust us, we’re doctors!
CHICKEN FAT WATCH
“Chicken fat” is obsolete cartoonists’ terminology for unimportant but fun details slipped into the art.
PANEL 1: One of the women has died.
PANEL 2: A box on a little table is labeled “WYRM” and has an illustration of a tapeworm framed by laurel branches.
PANEL 3: There are six ashtrays, overflowing with cigarette butts, on a table in the foreground. The entire panel is laid out to resemble a 1920s magazine ad.
PANEL 4: The sleeping woman is dressed like a flower child, and her hair is drawn with spirals, which illustrators did a lot in the 1970s. Outside a window, we can see Merryweather and Maleficent from Sleeping Beauty enjoying eating cake; Maleficent is feeding a bit to her pet raven Diablo.
PANEL 6: The doctor’s necktie has a pattern of cartoon tapeworms.
