Comic Books Are Entering Healthcare in an Unexpected Way

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 educati...