Where are the Humanities in the Medical Humanities? How Comics Can Improve Healthcare Training, Practice, and Dissemination

The last decade has seen a steady increase in the number of medical schools offering courses in the Medical Humanities, an interdisciplinary field that promotes the study of the Humanities in healthcare education as engendering greater awareness in practitioners in training and thereby better healthcare practice and dissemination.

While research in the field is rapidly developing, it problematically remains largely theoretical, based on a single case study, and/or presents Humanities scholarship as merely additive to rather than integrated in education.

It is therefore crucial to comprehensively examine how the Medical Humanities works—and can work—in and through practice.

This project will critically elaborate the benefits of further integrating the Humanities in the Medical Humanities by examining and expanding the discourse on Graphic Medicine.

A flourishing field attentive to the study and production of comics about health and healthcare, Graphic Medicine utilizes theoretical and artistic research practice in productive reciprocal exchange.

As such, it is well suited to evaluate and develop the aims, current applications, and potential of the Medical Humanities to positively affect not only healthcare scholars and practitioners, but also comics artists, patients, their families, carers, and the public.

Through cross-national, cross-cultural, and cross-linguistic analyses of Graphic Medicine, from healthcare education to online information, and from individual artistic practices to collaborations between comics artists and healthcare institutions, this project’s five work packages will offer unprecedented comparisons and unprecedented reach to multiple stakeholders who can use the project’s findings for future research.

In an era of global pandemic and rampant disinformation, the importance of improving healthcare training, keeping the public informed about healthcare, and creating new healthcare knowledge from the perspective of patients cannot be undervalued.