Research Guides: Graphic Medicine: Overview

What is Graphic Medicine?

‘The intersection between the medium of comics and the discourse of healthcare’. - Dr Ian Williams, Comics artist and physician, Founder of GraphicMedicine.org

Self drawing of Dr. Ian Williams

CMAJ Canadian Medical Association Journal

Graphic medicine explores the emotional and moral dimensions of experience. Scientific medicine determines which facts, disease concepts or medical treatments are right or wrong. Graphic medicine, on the other hand, shows how patients and caregivers are complex and human. Inside these narratives, the reader is given the opportunity to reflect on how personal identity, power and authority, subjectivity, politics, culture and society affect the practice of medicine.

Nickerson, S. M. (2018). Seeking graphic medicine narratives. Canadian Medical Association Journal, 190(12), E368–E369. https://doi.org/10.1503/cmaj.171318

Learn more about Graphic Medicine

Graphic Medicine
Graphic Medicine is a site that explores the interaction between the medium of comics and the discourse of healthcare. It is a community of academics, health carers, authors, artists, and fans of comics and medicine. The site is maintained by an editorial team under the direction of the Graphic Medicine International Collective.
Graphic Medicine: Ill Conceived & Well Drawn
An online exhibit from the National Library of Medicine, informative and visually appealing.
NNLM's Graphic Medicine Playlist
The Network of the National Library of Medicine provides conference presentation videos along with resources for using graphic medicine in the community.
Medicina Grafica
A sister site to Graphic Medicine, for Spanish readers. El papel de los cómics, las novelas gráficas y las ilustraciones en el mundo sanitario.

Why Add Graphics to Medicine?

Why Comics for Knowledge Translation
From University of Washington Traumatic Brain Injury Model System. Explores and explains why the visual medium is an ideal form of communicating and absorbing information.
Graphic medicine: use of comics in medical education and patient care
We believe that graphic stories have an important role in patient care, medical education, and the social critique of the medical profession. What follows is an introduction to graphic stories, with some
examples of what they are, how and why they work, and how they can enhance teaching and patient care.
Comics and the Ethics of Representation in Health Care
2018 AMA Journal of Ethics editorial on the growing popularity and unique abilities of graphic medicine.

Peer Reviewed Articles

Difficult Doctors, Difficult Patients: Building Empathy
Rarely are patients and physicians exposed to these instructions as colearners. The evidence for the utility of graphic stories, comics, and cartoons to improve patient comprehension and self-regulation is small but encouraging. The authors describe the use of graphic medicine as a teaching tool for engendering empathy from both the physician and the patient for the other during a shared clinical encounter. This use of educational comics in a colearning experience represents a new use of the medium as a teaching tool.
‘Fog of Medication’: psychiatric drugs, neurochemical selves, and graphic medicine
The mental illness narratives in graphic medicine navigate us through the experience of the patients and caregivers and complement the clinical perspective. These illness narratives showcase distinct challenges the patients face through the various phases such as diagnosis and treatment, including medication and institutionalisation.
Graphic medicine and health professional education: An internship comic book case study
This study aimed to determine whether comics in medical education (“graphic medicine”) can enhance professional identity formation (PIF) of junior doctors. This was accomplished through a multi-year trial of an internship comic book handbook that was specially designed to be used as part of an internship orientation program at Mackay Base Hospital.

Researching Graphic Medicine

Graphic Medicine Review
The Graphic Medicine Review publishes scholarly works relevant to both the comics medium (aka comic books, graphic novels, manga, bande dessinée, etc.) and healthcare, medicine, wellness, patient experience, and public health policy. GMR is an open-access resource primarily produced in English but international in scope and concerns.
American Medical Association Journal JAMA
In addition to offer articles on graphic medicine, JAMA has posted a yearly "Best of Graphic Medicine" acknowledgment since 2016.
Canadian Medical Association Journal CMAJ
CMAJ has been publishing graphic medicine articles in its Humanities section since 2018.
Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics
Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics covers all aspects of the graphic novel, comic strip and comic book focusing primarily, but not exclusively, on the twentieth and the twenty-first centuries. The emphasis is on the production and consumption of comics in their cultural, institutional and creative contexts.
The Comics Grid: Journal of Comics Scholarship
"The Comics Grid is a collaborative, peer-edited online academic journal dedicated to comics scholarship. Its purpose is to make original contributions to the field of comics scholarship and to advance the appreciation of comic art within academia and the general cultural mediascape.

Graphic Medicine

Graphic Medicine Explained

Subject Guide

What is Graphic Medicine?

Learn more about Graphic Medicine

Why Add Graphics to Medicine?

Peer Reviewed Articles

Researching Graphic Medicine