Rex Morgan, M.D.

Rex Morgan, M.D.
Marvin Bradley and Frank Edgington's Rex Morgan, M.D. (April 19, 1953)
Author(s)	Woody Wilson
Illustrator(s)	Graham Nolan
Current status / schedule	Running
Launch date	1948
Syndicate(s)	King Features Syndicate
Genre(s)	Soap opera

Rex Morgan, M.D. is an American soap-opera comic strip, created in 1948 by psychiatrist Dr. Nicholas P. Dallis under the pseudonym Dal Curtis. It maintained a readership well over a half-century, and in 2006 it was published in more than 300 U.S. newspapers and 14 foreign countries, according to King Features Syndicate. The strip's look and content was influenced by the work of Allen Saunders and Ken Ernst on Mary Worth. In 2013, Rex Morgan, M.D. celebrated its 65th year in print.

The story centers on Dr. Rex Morgan, who moved in 1948 to the fictional small town of Glenwood to take over a late friend's practice. Helping him grapple with a dizzying array of medical problems is his old friend's office manager and nurse, June Gale. Morgan and Gale collaborated in resolving the medical and emotional problems of patients and friends over the years. They finally married in 1995, and had their first child, a daughter they named Sarah June Morgan, several years later. Their second child, Michael Dallis Morgan, was introduced on 29 November 2015. Rex and June now operate their own free clinic. They have a dog named Abbey.

The strip has long been praised for its blunt tackling of social issues and taboo subjects, such as drug abuse, domestic violence, HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, diabetes, organ transplants, adoption and sexual harassment. The story's constant realism about these issues has led groups such as the Leahy Foundation to use Rex Morgan as a teaching tool. In the case of the Leahy Foundation, the strip has been used to teach their students about epilepsy at Harvard University. Some issues, particularly in the strip's early years, proved too controversial. In 1950, the Newark News refused to run one series in which a nurse tried to euthanize her sick father. The paper wrote that the sequences "dealt with an attempted mercy killing and had no place on this comic page."

Dallis claimed he created the strip to inform the general public about medical issues in an entertaining manner. For instance, one continuity from 1970 depicted the plight of an attractive young woman who frequently experienced gaps of "missing time": Morgan swiftly diagnosed her as suffering from petit mal, an obscure but genuine form of epilepsy. In later years, the story plots moved away from medical themes as Rex and June alternated in stories, confronting threats and danger from a variety of malfeasants. A popular story took place in 2006, in which longtime character Dr. Troy Gainer was revealed to be a fraud. Beginning in 2016, artist-writer Terry Beatty often put Rex back in medical settings, either at his clinic or in the hospital.