Orpen Cartoons

Diana (Dickie) Orpen spent long periods in the operating theatres at Hill End Hospital and became an acute observer of the activities and personalities. She would occasionally give voice to these observations, and her sense of humour, by producing light-hearted “snap-shot” interpretations of what was going on around her. As such, they become a powerful social record of the work being undertaken.

The first cartoon is a more considered copy of an initial sketch which appears in her personal papers, entitled “Artist at work” and dated May 17^th 1943. In it she envisions herself peering through the legs of the assembled surgical crowd in an effort to draw a procedure. In reality the lead surgeon would ask the team to move apart, giving her a minute only to capture what was going on before closing in around the patient again.

In the next cartoon, Orpen muses on the slightly odd-looking posture of a surgeon named “Cope”, taking a split skin graft, known as a Thiersch graft (“TG”), from the back of the patient’s right thigh. This irreverent pencil drawing from 1943 is inside the back cover (page 74) of the 17^th of her notebooks, and in which she made her more serious, clinical drawings.

“Are they light or deep?” she asks, referring to a patient’s degree of general anaesthesia, in this study of two dozing anaesthetists from 1945. 

The final drawing perfectly captures the self-conscious nerves of a new surgical recruit.