Healthcare and the four color panels

The Scientist writes about how the comics medium can help convey the topics of medical care:

Nearly two decades ago, Ian Williams enrolled in a fine arts program after completing his medical education. “I had two sides of my career,” said Williams, now a physician at The Hove Practice and cartoonist. “I had the medicine and I had the art side of it, and the languages of those two worlds were completely different.”

Hoping to find some common ground in these fields, he signed up for a master’s degree in medical humanities at Swansea University. During this time, he encountered a couple of graphic novels about cancer, prompting him to choose healthcare narratives in comics and graphic novels as his dissertation topic.

He soon went down a rabbit hole and found other comics about cancer and mental health and coined the term “Graphic Medicine” to denote the intersection of medicine and graphic novels. As a hobby, in 2007, he set up a website reviewing some of the graphic novels that had medical context. “Putting up this website literally changed my life,” Williams said, explaining that people soon got in touch with him to share their own experiences of using comics for healthcare education or to share their medical experiences.

Today, his graphic medicine website—that Williams coedits—catalogs graphic novels that can help in education and patient care. Members of this online community highlight the role that comics can play in healthcare, with the discipline broadly including memoirs of illness, educational comics for medical students and patients, and much more. In addition to the online community, people involved with graphic medicine also hold conferences around the world, with like-minded people sharing their experiences of using comics in healthcare.

With increasing popularity of graphic medicine across the globe, experts have also highlighted the utility of comics to critique the medical profession as well as in patient care. Researchers even explored the therapeutic possibilities of this discipline, with some of them arguing that drawing can help patients resolve their chaos through creative expression.

It's just like various other forms of science, where researchers and specialists are recognizing how useful they can be as educational tools. I think it's great comics have come to be viewed as a perfect vehicle for medical research, and I'm sure it'll avail the medical industry in the future.