[Graphic Medicine] Care objects, Affect and Graphic Medicine

Research and Humanities in Medical Education, 2015

Comics have often been treated as a juvenile and sub-literary art form; however, taking cues from the new-found cultural acceptance of comics, particularly with the publication of Art Spiegelman’s Maus (1986), Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth (2000), and Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home: A Family Tragedy (2006), there have emerged, over the past decade, a new breed of comics dealing with the patient/caregivers’ experiences, perspectives and identities. Christened as graphic medicine, these illness narratives use comics as a medium to address wide ranging disease/illness related issues. The present review examines the following issues: What is graphic medicine? Is there a tangible relationship between underground comics and graphic medicine? If so, can we regard underground comics as historical precedent to graphic medicine? What are the uses of comics in medicine? Broadly put, drawing examples from various graphic medical narratives, the paper seeks to trace the histo...

Journal of Medical Humanities - Springer

Effective doctor patient relationships are predicated on doctors' relational engagement and affective/holistic communication with the patients. On the contrary, the contemporary healthcare and patient-clinician communication are at odds with the desirable professional goals, often resulting in dehumanization and demoralization of patients. Besides denigrating the moral agency of a patient such apathetic interactions and unprofessional approach also affect the treatment and well-being of the sufferer. Foregrounding multifaceted doctor-patient relationships , graphic pathographies are a significant cultural resource which recreate the embodied moment of clinical encounters as they also lay bare qualitative tensions between patient' illness experience with doctor's professional understanding of the same. Taking these cues, the present article drawing theoretical postulates of Rita Charon, Deborah Lupton, and Havi Carel close reads Peter Dunlap-Shohl's My Degeneration: A Journey Through Parkinson's (2015), Brian Fies' Mom's Cancer (2006), and Stan Mack's Janet & Me: An Illustrated Story of Love and Loss (2004) to investigate the nature of doctor-patient relationship vis-à-vis communication and the implications of bad doctoring/communicative practices on patient identity and emotions. Furthermore, the article also examines the aesthetic and functional role of comics in bringing into relief the graphically mediated doctor-patient relationship. Effective doctor patient relationships are predicated on doctors' relational engagement and affective/holistic communication with the patients. Specifically, a delicate alignment mostly J Med Humanit https://doi.

This essay considers the ways in which graphic caregiving memoirs complicate the idealizing tendencies of ethics of care philosophy. The medium's " capacious " layering of words, images, temporalities, and perspectives produces " productive tensions.. . The words and images entwine, but never synthesize " (Chute 2010, 5). In graphic memoirs about care, this " capaciousness " allows for quick oscillation between the rewards and struggles of care work, representing ambiguous, even ambivalent attitudes toward care. Graphic memoirs effectively represent multiple perspectives without synthesis, part of a structural and thematic ambivalence that provides a provocative counterpart to the abstract idealism of ethics of care philosophy.

Newspapers have been a stronghold news source for centuries covering a wide range of topics. Though reporting is meant to be unbiased and only fact, stories produced are inevitably entwined with the author's cultural values-news content ranging from sports to healthcare, including articles, advertisements, and editorial cartoons provide valuable insight into the lives of society. Voices, or narratives, are a huge part of how culture is created and maintained. In healthcare, patients can feel like their voices are not heard. In an attempt to bridge the gap between medical and humanities research and to gain insight into doctor-patient interactions, this analysis asks what ideologies and beliefs are present in medical contexts and how are they represented within the editorial cartoon. Recent studies suggest that mass media as societal discourse may frame or position participants within a society. In this theory of framing, culture is formed from discourse through a reflexive process. Using Kress and Van Leeuwen's research on meaning making, this study will perform a discursive analysis on medical-themed editorial cartoons from Carpe Diem, Rhymes with Orange, The Lockhorns, to Bizarro. Through this close reading, explicit and implicit cultural beliefs held about medicine, including practitioners and patients, have been revealed, including the portrayal of the doctor's power over the patient and patient distrust in doctors. Taking into consideration media theory and the analysis of the comics, medical associations and practices may find valuable insight from the opinions and beliefs of not just the authors of these comics but society as a whole, which may prove important as debates over healthcare are ongoing.

Configuration , 2021

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.

Journal of Visual Communication in Medicine , 2023

Care paves efficient ways to sustain life during illness, nonetheless, caring for a chronically ill person is a hard, demanding, tedious and unglamorous work, often fraught with challenges. In contrast, creativity refers to a generative process that brings something new into existence. For instance, creativity implies a moment of discovery, the birth of new ideas, crossing existing boundaries among others. Perfusing creativity with care practices mitigates the difficult experiences, and aid in the healthy management of challenges put forth by the illness. The present article after elaborating on how creativity transforms care as a meaningful and constructive life-changing practice in the context of one of the chronic illnesses, dementia/AD, and briefing on graphic medicine-an interdisciplinary field of healthcare and comics, seeks to close-read Dana Walrath's Aliceheimer's: Alzheimer's Through the Looking Glass to demonstrate how care as creative practice provides a therapeutic direction when biomedical cure becomes impossible. The article investigates how such distinctive caring practices challenges the predominant perspective of dementia as a social death and aid in finding meaning in the alternative experiential realities of the person living with dementia. Further, the article also examines how these practices help in retaining the personhood and humanity of the care-receiver.

Journal of Medical Humanities, 2019

Comics has always had a critical engagement with socio-political and cultural issues and hence evolved into a medium with a subversive power to challenge the status quo. Staying true to the criticality of the medium, graphic medicine (where comics intersects with the discourse of healthcare) critiques the exploitative and unethical practices in the field of healthcare, thereby creating a critical consciousness in the reader. In close reading select graphic pathographies such as Gabby Schulz's Sick (2016), Emily Steinberg's Broken Eggs (2014), Ellen Forney's Marbles: Mania, Depression , Michelangelo & Me (2012) and Marisa Marchetto's Cancer Vixen (2009), the present article delineates how graphic medicine interrogates the larger than life forces in the field of healthcare. Drawing specific instances from the aforementioned graphic texts, the essay demonstrates that graphic medicine scrutinizes the political economy of health under capitalism. In so doing, the article illustrates how the pharmaceutical corporations, insurance companies, medical technology, and healthcare corporations marketize and commoditize health in the neoliberal era. Finally, the article attempts to theorize how graphic pathographies, mediating subjective experiences, generate a new critical literacy through the conflation of the personal and the political in the verbovisual medium of comics.

2018

Accredited as the provenance of creative art and appreciated for its verisimilar mimetic virtues, drawing is a cathartic form of visual art. Specifically, the curative utility of drawing is anchored on its multifaceted health-enhancing qualities. Drawing is often practised either as a technique of narration, as in visual communication, or as a therapeutic exercise, as in clinical contexts. Interestingly, in the field of graphic medicine, which is a productive intersection of comics and medicine, drawing is practised both as a narrative technique as well as a mode of therapy. Analysing scenes of drawing in selected graphic medicine memoirs such as David Small's Stitches: A Memoir (2009, New York: W.W. Norton & Co) and Katie Green's Lighter than My Shadow (2013, London: Random House), this article investigates how these graphic medical narratives offer an insight into the healing potentials of drawing. This article uses the term 'drawing' in two distinct yet interrelated senses: one is the process of drawing which denotes the depiction of the artist himself/herself involved in the act of drawing, and the other is the end product of drawing such as the picture/image or painting. By elaborating the psychological benefits of drawing, the article also brings into relief how the act of drawing facilitates self-reclamation by assisting patients or traumatized individuals in resolving their chaos through creative expression.

Journal of Creative Communications, 2018

Accredited as the provenance of creative art and appreciated for its verisimilar mimetic virtues, drawing is a cathartic form of visual art. Specifically, the curative utility of drawing is anchored on its multifaceted health-enhancing qualities. Drawing is often practised either as a technique of narration, as in visual communication, or as a therapeutic exercise, as in clinical contexts. Interestingly, in the field of graphic medicine, which is a productive intersection of comics and medicine, drawing is practised both as a narrative technique as well as a mode of therapy. Analysing scenes of drawing in selected graphic medicine memoirs such as David Small's Stitches: A Memoir (2009, New York: W.W. Norton & Co) and Katie Green's Lighter than My Shadow (2013, London: Random House), this article investigates how these graphic medical narratives offer an insight into the healing potentials of drawing. This article uses the term 'drawing' in two distinct yet interrelated senses: one is the process of drawing which denotes the depiction of the artist himself/herself involved in the act of drawing, and the other is the end product of drawing such as the picture/image or painting. By elaborating the psychological benefits of drawing, the article also brings into relief how the act of drawing facilitates self-reclamation by assisting patients or traumatized individuals in resolving their chaos through creative expression.