Graphic Medicine
Beyond the humanities and the social sciences, comics are finding their way into sciences. The emerging field of graphic medicine stands at the intersection of the discourse on healthcare, public health, and social science, using the medium of comics; it combines narrative medicine writing with visual representations of physical and emotional symptoms, to forge a new path in medical education and patient care, but also to express ordinary people’s experiences with sickness, health, the medical institution, and their own bodies. The term was originally coined by a comics artist and a physician, Dr Ian Williams, and gained further popularity with the publication of “The Graphic Medicine Manifesto”in 2015. The authors of the manifesto describe the power of graphic medicine as a new area of scholarship, emphasizing that narratives expressed through this medium. These narratives “[…] can engage members of the health professions with literary and visual representations and symbolic practices that offers patients, family members, physicians and other caregivers new ways to experience and work with the complex challenges of the medical experience.”