Comics and Medicine

Inspired by the rising inclusion of graphic works in classrooms, the conversation highlights the potential of comics, especially recent graphic medicine titles, as records of events such as the COVID-19 pandemic, capturing healthcare workers' experiences.

This essay analyzes four graphic memoirs of a daughter's caregiving through a mother's final years, examining how each text chronicles the mother's health-care needs; the daughter's emergence as caregiver; the negative emotions of caregiving; and the processes of forgetting by which ugly emotions are refined and re-storied as elegiac compassion.

This essay analyzes four graphic memoirs of a daughter's caregiving through a mother's final years, examining how each text chronicles the mother's health-care needs; the daughter's emergence as caregiver; the negative emotions of caregiving; and the processes of forgetting by which ugly emotions are refined and re-storied as elegiac compassion.

Care and labour are inextricably linked, particularly in the context of chronic illness, as caregivers often bear emotional, social, financial, and psychological burdens that can lead to negative consequences. While several studies have examined the physical and psychological impacts of care labour on caregivers, the felt experiences of caregiving (such as fear, guilt, and disappointment, among others) have not received adequate scholarly attention. The present article seeks to closely read selected sections from Sarah Leavitt’s Tangles: A Story About Alzheimer's, My Mother, and Me, a graphic memoir about Alzheimer’s caregiving, to bring to light the complex visceral experiences of unpaid caregivers. Although Tangles is an autobiographical narrative, it also serves as a means to re-examine the conventional notions of care that undervalue and disregard the lived experiences of caregivers. The article investigates how comics medium facilitates the representation of affective forces that shapes the lived experiences of caregivers. Further, the article also examines how exploring such affective realms render a nuanced understanding of care and caring relation. In doing so, this essay not only characterises care as an assemblage of bodies, discourses, performances, and affective relationships, among other things, but also underscores the cultural significance of graphic medicine in critiquing the traditional notions of care.

This essay argues that the ambivalent nature of shamea feeling that oscillates between the personal and the public, between hiding and uncoveringis meaningfully illuminated in narratives of care. Via drawing on two very different somatographies, Philip Roth's Patrimony (1991) and Sarah Leavitt's graphic narrative Tangles: Alzheimer's, My Mother and Me (2012), shame is explored from the perspective of adult children who care for their ill and dying parents. While Roth concentrates on the experiences of weakness, dependency and mortality and what it does to the virility and power associated with manhood, Leavitt focuses on shame within the context of spoilt or damaged identity and thus interconnects her mother's mental illness and her own lesbianism. While closely analysing the intricate mechanisms of shame in contexts of caregiving and care-receiving, it is demonstrated that shame is not merely a personal affliction or an interior quality, but that shame always feeds itself on previous stigmatisations that subconsciously influence present experiences. Both works focus on shame's capacity to destroy identity; simultaneously however, they draw the reader's attention to the ways in which shame constitutes fragile, non-essentialist new identities that counter and question the social imperatives that originally caused the feeling of shame.

As an existential practice, predicated on human interdependencies and labour, care attains remarkable significance in sustaining the life of the ill/disabled and is an indelible part of families and healthcare. Families, medicine, and institutional caring centres (such as old age homes, hospices among others) justify their commitment to care through emotional and practical/ technical approaches towards illness/disability. COVID-19 pandemic has just made human interdependency and significance of care exceptionally visible through laying bare the inevitable physical and social vulnerabilities. However, in the contemporary neoliberal society that favour autonomy and efficiency, care is overlooked, undermined, undervalued, and often linked with vulnerability and precarity. Graphic caregiving memoirs drawn by caregivers themselves are ideal sites for re-imagining, validating, depicting and reconceptualising experiences of care. In this email interview graphic artists Susan MacLeod, Simon Grennan, Ernesto Priego and Peter Wilkins reflect on care, the wide range of issues concerning its practice and suggest an alternative perspective towards caregiving. In Part A titled Of Comics and Care the authors respond to generic questions about their interest in comics, works, life, among others. In Part B titled What was I expecting? Compassion? Validation? The authors respond to questions related to their respective graphic narratives.

We bring into focus the role of the imagination and aesthetics in narrative sensemaking, particularly as it informs end-of-life care, in this engaged and ethnographically-inspired research project. To begin, we detail a brief history of hospice and situate our work amid literature on storytelling and health communication. We then introduce readers to Grace Hospice’s Creatively-Inspired Experiences (CIEs), opportunities for patients and their family members to engage in artful interactions, which was integrated within volunteer services as means of offering care beyond basic measures for comfort and companionship. Motivated by curiosities about how storytelling arises and functions in contexts often characterized as the end, this project illustrates the capacity of storytelling to traverse the temporalities of life stories by transcending the challenges of relational connection and narrative continuation in hospice contexts. Specifically, findings suggest that narrative imagination a...

Special Exits is a poignant graphic memoir by Joyce Farmer about her ageing parents and Alzheimer’s disease, a disease connected with loss of memory. The title Special Exits symbolizes serious issues faced by the narrator in caring her aged parents. The carer has to bathe, dress and feed her mom, thus taking up the responsibilities in an unfamiliar direction finally leading to personal loss. This paper will explore by close reading the graphic memoir and by applying theories of care giving, how comics can be used to inculcate ethics of care giving and investigate issues such as What are the ethical and social implications of care taker turned life writer? What is the relationship between Life writing and Graphic narratives? What is the role of Graphic Memoir in Medical humanities?

Special Exits is a poignant graphic memoir by Joyce Farmer about her aging parents and Alzheimer's disease, a disease connected with loss of memory. The title Special Exits symbolizes serious issues faced by the narrator in caring her aged parents. The carer has to bathe, dress and feed her mom, thus taking up the responsibilities in an unfamiliar direction finally leading to personal loss. This paper will explore by close reading the graphic memoir and by applying theories of care giving, how comics can be used to inculcate ethics of care giving and investigate issues such as What are the ethical and social implications of care taker turned life writer? What is the relationship between Life writing and Graphic narratives? What is the role of Graphic Memoir in Medical humanities?

We bring into focus the role of the imagination and aesthetics in narrative sensemaking, particularly as it informs end-of-life care, in this engaged and ethnographically-inspired research project. To begin, we detail a brief history of hospice and situate our work amid literature on storytelling and health communication. We then introduce readers to Grace Hospice’s Creatively-Inspired Experiences (CIEs), opportunities for patients and their family members to engage in artful interactions, which was integrated within volunteer services as means of offering care beyond basic measures for comfort and companionship. Motivated by curiosities about how storytelling arises and functions in contexts often characterized as the end, this project illustrates the capacity of storytelling to traverse the temporalities of life stories by transcending the challenges of relational connection and narrative continuation in hospice contexts. Specifically, findings suggest that narrative imagination a...

While there are several studies that focus on care settings in relation to verbal narratives, only a few studies have paid attention to how comics in general, and graphic medicine in particular, engage critical care environments and settings. Drawing strengths from the underground and alternative comics and capitalizing on health humanities, graphic medicine, a recent development in the comics genre, concentrates on the issues related to health, illness, and care. Coined by Ian Williams in 2007, graphic medicine refers to the intersection of comics and concerns of healthcare. Graphic medicine has always engaged informal, formal, and biomedical caregiving settings. Against this backdrop, the present article, drawing on relevant theoretical debates on spatial studies and care, examines Stan Mack's Janet& Me (2004), Joyce Farmer's Special Exits (2014), and Sarah Leavitt's Tangles (2012). In so doing, the article seeks to delineate care facilities (family, hospitals, among others) and their impact on patients.

Mental illness continues to be the most stigmatized medical condition across cultures. Autobiographical accounts on affective disorders/mental illnesses such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and depression among others not only foreground the distinctive circumstances of one’s suffering but also poignantly portray what it means to undergo the disquieting phases of treatment (such as drug therapy and institutionalisation). As such, these narratives open up dialogues about mental illness which otherwise remain stigmatised and thus contribute to overcome discrimination associated with mental illness. Of late, graphic medicine, one of the burgeoning genres of comics, have widened the scope of such first-person accounts of mental illness. Coined by a British physician and comics artist, Ian Williams in 2007, graphic medicine, typically narrated by patients, (professional) caregivers or physicians, refers to the intersection of comics and healthcare. Prominent graphic mental illness memoirs include Darryl Cunningham’s Psychiatric Tales (2010), Ellen Forney’s Marbles: Mania, Depression, Michelangelo & Me (2012), and Rachel Lindsay’s Rx (2018). In their mission to counteract medicine’s dogmatic and reductionist approaches, these visual memoirs foreground a plethora of subjective experiences as they also expose and change the current mental health procedures for the better. Taking these cues and in the context of deteriorating global mental health prompted by COVID-19 pandemics, three authors, Clem Martini, Tyler Page and Tatiana Gill, in an email interview share their views on mental illness, graphic medicine, identity crisis, stigma, and, the larger systemic challenges of mental illness treatments and care-giving. The interview consists of two parts. In the first part Drawing Mental Illness the authors respond to questions common to all of them and in the second part Greater Choice, Better Care each of them answer specific questions pertaining to their respective memoir.

Affordances, in the context of comics, connote to the general attributes of the medium such as temporality, spatiality, gestures, tone/handwriting and economy. Although comics evinces a dynamic relationship among these elements, it is possible to delineate functional and rhetorical role of these affordances on a conceptual and technical level. Taking these cues, the paper after briefly reviewing the definition and scope of graphic medicine aims to demonstrate the functional and rhetorical role of the aforementioned affordances in communicating illness and illness related experiences. Among other issues this article also seeks to address the following: how do comics engage in the visual and verbal translation of the experiences of chronic illness? how do affordances of comics facilitate the readers' haptic experience of an author's subjective trauma? Despite its juvenile legacy, comics capacitates graphic medicine to represent physical and emotional aspects of narrating subjective illness experiences within the medium. The paper concludes that comics is a uniquely suited communicative medium as it diagrams the interiority of illness experience, and, in the process, evolves itself as a locus of tacit knowledge through its translation and mediation of emotional truths and affective states altered by illness.

The article offers information on the young adult reader's critical comparison of intersectional identities and response of students with a variety of novel titles such as "Hatchet" and "Number the Stars." It further discusses students are intervening in literary spaces of inequality; intersectional analysis questions for young adult literature to examine how narratives are constructed; and opportunity for students to work on English Language Arts (ELA) standards.

As a constructive derivative of several altruistic movements, such as narrative medicine, medical humanities and health humanities, graphic medicine is a nonconformist ideological inverse to the absolutism of medical knowledge. Exposing the limitations of biomedicine, which prioritises the voice of the physician, graphic medicine provides an inclusive approach towards medical conditions through its perspectival richness and experiential realities. Formulated as a means to express the voice of the marginalised community of sufferers, graphic medicine expedites creative and forceful articulation of the narratives of patients and caregivers, which were hitherto discarded as inauthentic by the existing medical system. As a wholesome methodology that equally values the subjective experiences of patients, physicians and caregivers, graphic medicine provides numerous ways of representing affective truths about illness conditions. Thus, by creating a mutually beneficial field of study for both biomedicine and humanities by yoking together medicine and comics, graphic medicine fosters an empathetic attitude towards human conditions. The present chapter traces the evolution of graphic medicine from the historical nexus of comics and medicine, through narrative medicine, to health humanities, and introduces graphic medicine as a cultural alternative to the existing paradigms of medical knowledge. Additionally, this chapter also aims to rationalise the unique aspects and cultural roles of graphic medicine−pedagogical, therapeutic, and community formational.

While the subject of illness in general goes a long way back, cancer itself entered the medium of comics rather late. According to Rhode and Connor, it “was rarely mentioned … Before Jim Starlin’s The Death of Captain Marvel” (112), with the latter being published not until 1982. Although some other examples such as Why, Charlie Brown, Why? (1990) or Hellblazer: Dangerous Habits (1991) also tackled the subject beforehand, it was American Splendor creator Harvey Pekar and his wife Joyce Brabner’s 1994 “collaborative autobiography” (Chaney 22) Our Cancer Year which is credited to be “the breakthrough work” (119) in the field. This is not only because it is in some way autobiographical – since it is based on actual events – it also depicts cancer in a very comprehensive, serious and detailed way. In the line with medical narratives in general, it can “offer a window into the subjective reality of other sufferers and provide companionship through a shared experience
in a more immediate manner than might be gained from joining a self-help group or reading patient information leaflets” (Williams in McNicol 49). For that reason, this specific work is treated in the following paper.

Affordances, in the context of comics, connote to the general attributes of the medium such as temporality, spatiality, gestures, tone/handwriting and economy. Although comics evinces a dynamic relationship among these elements, it is possible to delineate functional and rhetorical role of these affordances on a conceptual and technical level. Taking these cues, the paper after briefly reviewing the definition and scope of graphic medicine aims to demonstrate the functional and rhetorical role of the aforementioned affordances in communicating illness and illness related experiences. Among other issues this article also seeks to address the following: how do comics engage in the visual and verbal translation of the experiences of chronic illness? how do affordances of comics facilitate the readers' haptic experience of an author's subjective trauma? Despite its juvenile legacy, comics capacitates graphic medicine to represent physical and emotional aspects of narrating subjective illness experiences within the medium. The paper concludes that comics is a uniquely suited communicative medium as it diagrams the interiority of illness experience, and, in the process, evolves itself as a locus of tacit knowledge through its translation and mediation of emotional truths and affective states altered by illness.

Among the growing number of works of graphic fiction, a number of titles dealing directly with the patient experience of illness or caring for others with an illness are to be found. Thanks in part to the Medical Humanities movement, many medical schools now encourage the reading of classic literature to gain insight into the human condition. Until recently, the medium of comics (the term is used in the plural to refer to both the physical objects and the attendant philosophy and practice surrounding them) has received little attention from healthcare scholars, even though some authors argue that graphic fiction is, in fact, a form of literature. This paper suggests that it is time that the medium was examined by healthcare professionals and studies some acclaimed comic works. Drawing on the principles of narrative medicine, this paper will ask whether comics and graphic novels could be used as a resource for health professionals, patients and carers.

CONFIGURATIONS special issue on GRAPHIC MEDICINE
Now out! Access it online through Project Muse.
Volume 22, Number 2, Spring 2014
Table of Contents
Special Issue on Graphic Medicine
Articles and Graphics
Introduction
pp. 149-152 | DOI: 10.1353/con.2014.0023
Susan Squier, J. Ryan Marks

Avatars, Illness, and Authority: Embodied Experience in Breast Cancer Autopathographics
pp. 153-181 | DOI: 10.1353/con.2014.0011
Emily Waples

Graphic Analysis: Transitional Phenomena in Alison Bechdel’s Are You My Mother?
pp. 183-203 | DOI: 10.1353/con.2014.0014
Lisa Diedrich

“Harry”
pp. 205-206 | DOI: 10.1353/con.2014.0016
MK Czerwiec

The Trauma of Diagnosis: Picturing Cancer in Graphic Memoir
pp. 207-223 | DOI: 10.1353/con.2014.0018
Nancy K. Miller

“My Avatar”; “In the Waiting Room”; “Dr. Sweater”
pp. 224-226 | DOI: 10.1353/con.2014.0020
Nancy K. Miller

“Cruel to Be Kind”
pp. 227-228 | DOI: 10.1353/con.2014.0022
Ian Williams

“Kancer Sutra”
pp. 229-236 | DOI: 10.1353/con.2014.0010
Isobel Williams

Representations of Health, Embodiment, and Experience in Graphic Memoir
pp. 237-253 | DOI: 10.1353/con.2014.0013
Courtney Donovan

“You Silly Little Girl”; “Ultrasound”, “Pregnancy Test”; “Lost vs. Loss”
pp. 255-261 | DOI: 10.1353/con.2014.0015
Paula Knight

Becoming Bone Sheep
pp. 263-294 | DOI: 10.1353/con.2014.0017
Martina Schlünder, Pit Arens, Axel Gerhardt

Book Reviews
Biological Relatives: IVF, Stem Cells, and the Future of Kinship by Sarah B. Franklin (review)
pp. 295-297 | DOI: 10.1353/con.2014.0019
Sara DiCaglio

The Rhetoric of Pregnancy by Marika Seigel (review)
pp. 297-298 | DOI: 10.1353/con.2014.0021
Heather Latimer

Lighter Than My Shadow by Katie Green (review)
pp. 299-301 | DOI: 10.1353/con.2014.0009
Michelle N. Huang

Non-fiction graphic novels about illness and death created by patients and their loved ones have much to teach all readers. However, the bond of empathy made possible in the comic form may have special lessons for healthcare providers who read these texts and are open to the insights they provide.

Through a comparison of two graphic novels concerned with the experience of cancer diagnosis and treatment, Brian Fies's Mom 's Cancer (2006) and Harvey Pekar and Joyce Brabner's Our Cancer Year (1994), this essay suggests some of the strengths and limitations of the medical humanities in responding to the experience of illness. It demonstrates how the graphic medium enables us to generate a new set of reading strategies and thus to articulate a more complex and powerful analysis of illness, disability, medicine, and health. Finally, the essay considers the question raised by the comparison of the graphic novels: whether the term "health humanities" might not be preferable to its predecessor, "medical humanities." T HE DAY I BEGAN pulling my thoughts together for this essay, I turned on my computer to be greeted by the "Word of the Day"-nescience: lack of knowledge or awareness; ignorance.That "Word of the Day" was right on target: I was sitting down to write about a lack of awareness or ignorance in medicine that can be remedied by the medical humanities. An epistemological narrowing characterizes biomedical thinking, I would argue, that impedes our ability to heal. In what follows, I want to explore how the medical humanities combat that narrowing, replacing medical nescience with healing knowledge.