Format and plot
“Courses of Treatment” is built on the contrast between a solemn congratulation and an unpleasant outcome. The frame shows a doctor in a white coat and a cap with a red cross, and a patient sitting across from a desk with paper and a pen. The doctor says “Congratulations, you have completed a course of treatment for…”, and the line breaks off on a preposition. The break leaves unclear what exactly was being treated and forces the reader to supply the diagnosis.
The meaning of the joke is this: the patient is asked to fill out a questionnaire, and it returns to him memories of the illness itself. A formal procedure for ending treatment turns out to be a source of fresh reminders of suffering. The comic effect rests on a bureaucratic tone: the doctor speaks calmly and matter-of-factly, while what is happening is traumatic.
The drawing is done in a minimalist manner: rounded shapes without detail, a pale blue background, and short text in large capital letters. This simplicity allows any illness to be substituted into such a comic, and that is why the format remains universal: the reader sees only the frame of the situation and fills in the details himself.
Author and attribution
The tag “Chilik” in the catalog points to Anatoly Chilik, a Russian comics author. According to book catalogs, he publishes comic collections, including the book “Chto zhe ya natvoril…” (“What on Earth Did I Do…”). These details confirm that Chilik works in the book-comic genre, but they do not prove authorship of this particular frame.
It has not been established that “Courses of Treatment” was published by Chilik in a specific book or at a specific time. Collections do not record the exact date of first publication of an individual frame, so it is impossible to link the meme to a specific edition.
It is important to distinguish the author of a series from the author of a specific work. Comics of this format are often reposted on social networks without attribution, and the original source is then lost. For this reason, the attribution in the article is given as catalog data, not as an established fact.
Origin and date
The meme dates to 2017. The origin of this specific comic is not known: the first publication is unidentified, as is how the frame spread in 2017.
The genre on which the meme rests has been known for a long time. A comic about medicine, in which the humor rests on the gap between a doctor's words and the patient's real experience, belongs to the traditional subjects of caricature. The meme therefore fits logically into the broader tradition of medical satire, which moved online together with the themes of queues, bureaucracy, and unsuccessful visits to the doctor.
Information about the comic's first publication is not yet available.
Usage
As a rule, the meme is used in correspondence when the subject is a long or unpleasant treatment, or when formalities are being ironically assessed: questionnaires, surveys, reports. The phrase “Congratulations, you have completed…” easily carries over to any situation of finishing a complicated process where the result turns out to be unexpectedly heavy.
The structure of the meme allows variations: the illness can be replaced with any lengthy process, and the questionnaire with any formal document. Thanks to this, the format stays relevant and is not tied to a specific event.
The humor is usually gentle. The meme does not mock patients and is not addressed to a particular doctor. It works at the level of a general situation that most people who have dealt with medicine will recognize.
Match to image
The frame shows a doctor in a cap with a red cross and a white coat, sitting across from a patient, along with a table with paper and a pen. The text above the doctor breaks off on the preposition “from”, which corresponds to the meme.
The questionnaire and the subsequent memories from the description are not shown in the frame. This part of the plot is conveyed only by the catalog text, so a reader who knows only the image sees the start of the scene but not its resolution.
