Dr. Ian Williams, a Welsh-born physician, started publishing comics under a pseudonym in 2007, the year he began a website devoted to so-called graphic medicine. Currently located in Brighton, Williams is now one of the primary creators of what has become a rich field combining comics and health care, broadly conceived. A group of artists, academics and medical professionals now maintain a resource-rich version of the website (graphicmedicine.org), sponsor an annual international conference and oversee a book series. In 2015 they issued the “Graphic Medicine Manifesto,” a part-prose, part-comics title this paper reviewed favorably. Williams, one of the manifesto’s authors, is now out with his second book of graphic fiction, THE LADY DOCTOR (Penn State University, $24.95), which, like his first, “The Bad Doctor,” is set in a small town in Wales and offers the engrossing perspective of a hard-working and fallible physician. Lois Pritchard, 40, single and a secret smoker, wears a sharp black bob and pointy high-heeled boots. A general practitioner, she also works part time at the local Genitourinary Medicine clinic, treating various problems of genital and urinary origins that the book selectively illustrates, including numerous S.T.D.s (“muck in the fuel pipe,” as one man puts it).

Although Lois is an appealingly fleshed-out character, the plot points of “The Lady Doctor” are nothing special: Lois’s mother, who abandoned the family when Lois was small, now wants Lois to help her with a liver transplant; Lois and her journalist buddy take psilocybin mushrooms, in an almost-skippable section; there are standard romantic ups and downs. Instead, what makes this book fascinating is its sensitive portrayal of Lois’s interactions with a range of patients. In recurrent, wordless pages throughout, with his clean and fluid black line art,, Williams illustrates the rhythm of Lois’s professional routine through whom and what she encounters: an assortment of faces, body parts and affects streaming by in an even staccato.

While in an early scene Lois and a fellow doctor wonder about their ability to achieve empathy with patients, “The Lady Doctor” itself illuminates something just as profound: her coolheaded receptivity to nominally depressing and gross manifestations of humanity, her rejection of the judgmental in the service of tending to the body. In one scene she removes a curtain finial lodged deep in a patient’s vagina; in another she vomits, in private, after examining a man’s feet; and there are plenty of drawings of genital procedures that may make the reader squirm but that Lois treats calmly and clinically. Lois is human — “Please God, kill me now,” she thinks after the foot episode — but Williams reveals, in his careful attention to her work as a doctor, how seriously she understands her profession and how open she is to patients.