“So what is ‘Graphic Medicine’?” the illustrated Graphic Medicine Manifesto, published in 2015, asks in its opening panel. Registered nurse MK Czerwiec – in comic form, appropriately enough – is the first to reply, “It is the intersection of the medium of comics and the discourse of healthcare.” Dr. Ian Williams then offers, “Graphic Medicine combines the principles of narrative medicine with an exploration of the visual systems of comic art, interrogating the representation of physical and emotion signs and symptoms with the medium.”
“It’s an approach to the education of health professionals, as well as an emerging area of interdisciplinary academic study,” medical professor Michael Green adds, with Susan Squier of the Pennsylvania State University chiming in, “Graphic Medicine is also a movement for change that challenges the dominant methods of scholarship in healthcare, offering a more inclusive perspective of medicine, illness, disability, caregiving, and being cared for. Comics give voice to those who are often not heard.”
The contemporary movement of combining comics with healthcare began in 2007 when Dr. Ian Williams launched a website he called “Graphic Medicine” as a way to categorize the growing number of comics being published that had ties to healthcare. The term “Graphic Medicine” was intentionally vague so as to incorporate a broad range of examples, from graphic memoirs dealing with illnesses, educational comics, humorous comic strips referencing healthcare, and even therapeutic workshops that included the making of comics. There were other medical professionals who shared Williams’ enthusiasm for what became known as “Graphic Medicine,” many of whom were already working on their own initiatives.
Michael Green and Kimberly Williams from the Hershey, Pennsylvania, branch of Penn State University are two prominent examples. Green was an internal medicine doctor who specialized in ethical issues surrounding healthcare, many of which arose due to poor communication between doctors and patients. Williams, meanwhile, was a literature professor who recognized that a person’s life story inevitably changed when faced with a major illness. Since their interests overlapped, Michael Green suggested to Kimberly Williams that the two of them write a paper on the use of comics to better explain the effects of illnesses.
The subsequent article was not only published in the March 3, 2010, edition of The BMJ healthcare journal but made the cover as well, giving the emerging field of Graphic Medicine further legitimacy. That same year, Dr. Ian Williams organized a Graphic Medicine Conference in London, with a second taking place in Chicago in 2011. Similar conferences have been held every year since, with the locations ranging from Baltimore to Seattle, Vermont to Toronto. A 2021 “UnConvention” was held virtually due to the Covid pandemic.
Both the Graphic Medicine website launched by Ian Williams in 2007 and the Graphic Medicine Conferences were eventually merged into a non-profit Graphic Medicine International Collective in 2019, “a community of academics, health carers, authors, artists, and fans of comics and medicine.” The Penn State University Press, meanwhile, had already begun publishing a series of books dealing with Graphic Medicine a few years earlier.
“For healthcare practitioners, patients, family members, and caregivers dealing with illness and disability, graphic narratives enlighten complicated or difficult experiences,” their website states. “They can also communicate the scaled meanings of health, from the molecular to the human and to the planetary, including works addressing climate change, environmental pollution, zoonotic diseases, and other complex problems not commonly conceptualized as ‘medical.’ For scholars in literary, cultural, and comics studies, the medium articulates a complex and powerful rethinking of the boundaries of medicine and the expansive meanings of health.”
The use of comics in healthcare not only helps patients in general but is especially effective when it comes to youths and non-English speaking segments of the population. Children who may have difficulty articulating the symptoms they are experiencing, for instance, often have an easier time drawing images reflecting their ailments. According to WebMD, meanwhile, a mere six percent of U.S. doctors consider themselves adept at speaking Spanish even though 18.9% of the population is Hispanic. Communicating via images thus cuts through the language barrier.
In addition to Penn State University and traditional comic book publishers, a host of other organizations likewise produce comic books in the field of Graphic Medicine. Booster Shot Comics has created a number of illustrated publications geared towards children and their parents on asthma, allergies, and pain management, while Juma Health has developed a series of “Understanding” comics dealing with diabetes, blood transfusions, and obsessive-compulsive disorder.
It’s not just within the United States that incorporating comics into healthcare is catching on. WebMD notes that a 2018 survey of medical students in India found that while 22% had never heard of Graphic Medicine, 77% believed comics would be useful as a teaching tool. In Norway, a social anthropologist was teamed with a graphic artist and people struggling with drug addictions to educate the populace on the effects of illegal drugs and hepatitis C.
Since anyone has the capability to draw – no matter how rudimentary – Graphic Medicine likewise builds community and a shared bond between those within the healthcare profession and both former and current patients. “Can reading comics help physicians better understand the patient experience?” Matthew Noe, lead librarian at the Harvard Medical School and board member of the Graphic Medicine International Collective, rhetorically asks on WebMD. “Can we really help build empathy through reading comics? These, and many more, are all questions explored in graphic medicine.”
He then adds, “We take the collaborative nature of comics and the understanding that health is a community project and come together to share, learn, and support people.”
“Comics have often been associated with cultural change and are ideal for exploring taboo or forbidden areas of illness and healthcare,” Kimberly Meyers, co-creator of a Medical Humanities course at Penn State University, explains in the Graphic Medicine Manifesto. “We want our work to challenge accepted conventions of scholarship, merging the personal with the pedagogical, the subjective with the objective – the image with the text.”
Thanks to the work of the Graphic Medicine International Collective and an untold number of healthcare professionals across the country and around the world, the image and the text – as well as the graphic and the medicine – are becoming intertwined.
Anthony Letizia