The best humor is funny because it’s true. Well, this cartoon on “The Twelve Types of Medical Students” is true.

The other cartoons in the series are also pretty good. My surgery rotation was a lot like this, especially holding a retractor for 12 hours during a liver transplant case (starting at 2am), then being assigned the honor of tying the skin sutures, which the chief resident undoubtedly thought was a “reward” but which felt more like a punishment given my painfully cramped fingers. Of course, I gave him the politically correct answer of, “Yes sir, thanks for letting me tie the skin sutures!”, and did what I was told.

(On my first day of surgery rotation, one of the junior residents took me aside and said that the faculty valued “toughness” in their students, and hence we should not display any “weakness”. As examples of weakness, he included “need for eating, sleeping, or urination”; he was only half-joking.)

My Ob-Gyn rotation was similar to this, since I also did it in a posh suburban hospital, not the grimy inner city hospital in Detroit. Just don’t get me started on feminism and Ob-Gyn; as a lowly med student I developed many ways of staying out of the ideological debates between my superiors on this topic.

(More cartoons are available here; I also liked her Psychiatry cartoon.)