Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

The Joke

The comic presents a fictional "TV Show Idea: Seventeenth Century Medical Drama." It parodies modern medical dramas like Grey's Anatomy or House, but set in an era when medicine was essentially guesswork and bloodletting. In the first panels, a doctor diagnoses a patient: "He's got too much blood! And too much bile!" Another doctor admits, "They never taught me about this in barber school" -- a reference to the historical fact that barbers doubled as surgeons in earlier centuries.

The drama escalates as they propose to "get the excess blood and bile out in one stroke" using leeches, which one doctor has "never been tried before!" with dramatic flair. A post-surgery scene reveals a "Months Later" time jump where it turns out "we've lost him" -- and then the punchline: "Have you noticed we always lose them?" followed by a beat and then "Suicide." This dark ending parodies the emotional burnout arcs common in medical dramas, but made absurd by the fact that their entire medical practice is fundamentally useless, so of course they always lose their patients.

The Humor

The comedy comes from mapping the tropes of prestige medical television -- the intense diagnoses, the maverick procedures, the emotional toll on doctors -- onto a period when "medicine" consisted of bloodletting, leeches, and humoral theory. Every beat that would be dramatic in a modern hospital show becomes absurd when the doctors are barber-surgeons whose treatments are essentially guaranteed to kill the patient. The final dark turn into a doctor's emotional crisis is the cherry on top: the show treats inevitable patient death with the same gravitas as a rare surgical complication.

References

The term "chirugeon" (also spelled "chirurgeon") is an archaic English word for surgeon, derived from the Greek "cheirourgos" (hand-worker). Barber-surgeons were indeed a real historical profession; the red-and-white barber pole is thought to symbolize blood and bandages from this era. Humoral theory, which held that illness resulted from imbalances of blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile, dominated Western medicine from antiquity through the early modern period.