It is true, but humour penetrates into all spheres of life, including medicine. Doctor and patient is the unfolding subject for world's humourous folklore, that treats with no medicine but laughter. Laughter happened to be a kind of jogging, environmentally friendly medicine. It improves breathing, stimulates endocrine system, and reduces blood pressure.

The "heart of laughter" is in the right cerebral hemisphere. If it is injured, a person does not grasp the humour, does not smile, and puts on years very fast. Loss of ability to comprehend caricatures is schizophrenia test. Laughter of such a person is like a grin, dull and bitter. Anaesthesia effect of laughter is scientifically proven. In one hospital in Mutala, Sweden there is a "room of laughter", where chronic invalids are treated with laughter.

Remember, that in the Middle Ages medicine was directly connected with buffoonery, which included amusement and satire. It is seen in the lubok (cheap popular print) "A Dutch internist and a kind chemist" which ridicules the inventors of the aging medicine. Parody medical books, prescriptions, and pieces of advice were known in Russia long ago. They amused the readers, as well as unmasked the mountebanks.

In England in the XVIIth century W. Hogarth ridiculed the doctors whose attitude towards drops and pills was "if it does not kill, it will cure" ("At

the Mountebank", "Gullibility, Superstition, and Fanaticism"). "Apology for surgeons" also were the characters of his satiric engravings ("Revenge for Cruelty" from the series "Four Degrees of Cruelty"). It is interesting that for some years in the past surgeons as well as butchers were not elected jury into the court. Later the medical theme in caricature was continued by T. Rolandson in the pictures close to the "black humour" - "Amputation" and "Teeth Transplantation". This picture is devoted to the unsuccessful attempts to put a healthy tooth into a place of just extracted.

O. Daumier and J. B. Moliere ridiculed good for nothing doctors (Moliere's plays "Le medecin volant", "Le medecin malgre lui", "Le malade imaginaire").

Russian humorous magazines always mentioned doctors, patients, and their illnesses. In the caricatures in "Budilnik" provincial healers asking for high fees were ridiculed; even the bacteria uniting against the doctors were drawn. In "Satiricon" caricaturists mocked drunk and ignorant doctors. The writers created the cognitive and at the same time humorous work "Anatomy and Physiology of a Person" which amusingly explained the functions of all human organs - beginning with a nose, a thermometer completing with a "worm-like appendix".

In the Soviet times the magazines satirized the hospital rules. In 1926 in the "Krokodil" magazine K. Rotov showed patients and doctors in a not-heated hospital who warmed themselves gathering round a person with fever, and put a kettle on his forehead and a pan on his belly.

Humorous pictures in "Zdorovie" ("Health") magazine and in "Post", rubric in "Meditsinskaya Gazeta" ("The Medical Paper") are also worth mentioning.

Exhibitions of the "medical caricatures" were held abroad ( Marostica, 1978 ) and in Russia as well (Moscow, 1989 ). In 1991 a collection of caricatures "Doctors and Patients Exchange Smiles" was published in Petrozavodsk. A lot of cartoons are devoted to the famous doctors -

V. Dikul, A. Elizarov, etc. Some well-known caricaturists, for example, M. Chemodanov and M. Cheremnikh graduated from medical universities.