Graphic Medicine @ UND

According to physician and health sciences scholar Ian Williams, graphic medicine sits at "the intersection between the medium of comics and the practice of healthcare," which includes graphic memoirs of illness, educational comics about medical [practice], along with infographics, and visual texts that engage with discourses of healthcare, illness, and therapy, among others.

Graphic medicine is not only the use of comics for healthcare/medicine, but also reading these ideas within comics not classified explicitly as graphic medicine. While related to other fields like medical humanities or health humanities, graphic medicine purposefully does not foreground doctors over other healthcare folks, patients, or comics artists. Rather, graphic medicine posits that comics have therapeutic potential, often visualizing invisible or abstract concepts and experiences, including how graphic narratives might help readers find catharsis or relief.

Examples include:

• Graphic memoirs that use personal experiences to convey narratives related to healthcare;
• Comics by/about medical workers or patients to share insights, experiences, and narratives of those working with medicine (good, bad, and the messiness in between);
• Comics about the healthcare system, including how it works, experiences within, and what stories are untold;
• Educational comics that educate audiences about a particular healthcare or medical subject;
• Graphic reportage that uses comics to report out on medical and healthcare-related events, trends, and phenomena.

In the Graphic Medicine Manifesto, Susan Squier states, "so too graphic medicine resists the notion of the universal patient and vividly represents multiple subjects with valid and, at times, conflicting points of view and experiences."