Seventeenth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

Graphic medicine is the intersection of the medium of comics and the discourse of healthcare. This diverse and novel approach to arts and medicine, ushered in new modes to address illness and those aspects of social experience that transcend both the realms of medicine and canonical literature. This new genre in medical humanities utilize the creative license and the affordances of comics which allows an exploration of multiple meanings of illness and disease. Seminal graphic medical narratives which address various disease conditions and disability include Brian Fies’ Mom’s Cancer (2006), Marisa Marchetto’s Cancer Vixen (2009), Ellen Forney’s Marbles (2012), Ian Williams’ The Bad Doctor (2014), and Rachel Lindsay’s Rx (2018). Mostly autobiographical, these graphic pathographies also address a wide range of issues concerning illness, healthcare, and medicine such as doctor-patient relationship, caregiving, patient identity, industrialization and commercialization of healthcare, among others. Taking these cues, this paper addresses the following questions: How do comics engage in the visual and verbal translation of the experiences of illness? How do the affordances of comics facilitate the readers’ experience of an author’s subjective trauma? The paper argues that comics is a uniquely suited communicative medium to diagram the interiority of illness experience. It focuses on the ways in which graphic medicine represents physical and emotional aspects of narrating subjective illness experiences. Accordingly, graphic medicine, through its visual delineation of the lived experience of illness along novel perspectives, provides a unique dimension to the field of narrative medicine.