It is dark all around. Balancing precariously on her right leg like a ballerina, and holding a pole, the woman traipses across a rope that is pegged at some infinite point in space. A vulture flies out of nowhere to settle on the pole, almost unbalancing her. Thrown off-guard, she looks down — and horror, below is a pool seething with crocodiles. Laughter resounds in the darkness as our brave heroine’s vision fades out...
Readers would be forgiven for thinking this is a snapshot from a Gothic romance. The reality is actually darker — the paragraph is a paraphrase of a cancer patient’s accounts from the graphic memoir, Mom’s Cancer, by Brian Fies. On the website of the book, which has received much acclaim since it was published in 2006, Fies says with amazing cool, “My mother was diagnosed with incurable lung cancer. I made a comic strip about it.”
Fies is not alone in trying to deal with illness with a branch of art that is rarely associated with sickness: comics. This new breed of comic books, a sizeable sample of which can be found on the website graphicmedicine.org, deals with the experiences of patients and caregivers. But these aren’t health bulletins. Rather, they demystify illness by talking of it as something that happens to all of us, something that has to be fought and conquered or succumbed to. Reading these comics can become a method of coping, as they not only create a sense of community, dispelling the aloneness that makes illness always more terrifying, but also inject a healthy dose of humour into an otherwise grim subject.
Caregiving and comics
And that’s not all. The Graphic Medicine comics represent the actualisation of an aim repeatedly emphasised by literary scholars but seldom achieved: the integration of what British novelist C.P. Snow in his seminal lecture series called the “two cultures” of Science and Humanities.
The Graphic Medicine website was started in 2007 by Ian Williams, a physician and artist from Britain. It was upgraded and relaunched in 2012, when Williams was joined by M.K. Czerwiec, Artist-in-Residence at Northwestern Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago and Senior Fellow of the George Washington School of Nursing Center for Health Policy & Media Engagement, a nursing school based in Washington, D.C. While Williams’ debut graphic novel, The Bad Doctor , was published in June 2014, Czerwiec has been writing comics under the pseudonym Comic Nurse since 2000.
In an email exchange, Czerwiec defined Graphic Medicine as “all that exists at the intersection of the medium of comics and the experience of health, body, caregiving, and illness.” Explaining the use of the comics to write about illness, Czerwiec said, “Comics are a great medium for patient and practitioner education as well as for patient and practitioner reflection. I believe it is that simple! Why? Because comics are perfect when there is much information to be learned, when it’s important to learn, and the person who needs to learn is experiencing stress.”
The website surprises readers with its long list of graphic narratives and health-related comics authored by patients, caretakers and physicians, focussing on a range of illnesses, from cancer to AIDS to Asperger Syndrome. Each comic comes with a detailed review, which gives you an idea of the content.
For instance, Williams’ The Bad Doctor brings the doctor down from the pedestal; Czerwiec’s Taking Turns: Stories from HIV/AIDS Care Unit 371 speaks of her experience of nursing in an AIDS unit; the funny Cancer Vixen shares the story of breast cancer patient Marisa Marchetto, with a bright purple book cover that has Marisa’s character screaming, “Cancer, I am going to kick your butt...”.
Then there’s Sarah Leavitt’s Tangles , a striking narrative of a caregiver talking to an Alzheimer’s patient; Frederik Peeters’ Blue Pills is a ‘positive love story’ centred on AIDS. Although these are personal accounts, they also address issues related to healthcare, such as medical negligence, vexed doctor-patient relationships, the corporatisation of medical treatment, patients’ rights, the role of insurance providers, and so on.
Sketching out pain
Given the special ability of comics to graphically describe emotions, states of mind and the human drama that often unfolds during illness, many of these ‘stories’ now find a place in medical and nursing curricula of the U.S.
For instance, Michael Green, a member of the Graphic Medicine collective, teaches a course called ‘Graphic Storytelling and Medical Narratives’ for fourth-year medical students at Penn State College of Medicine. Not only does he ask his students to read graphic medical narratives but he also encourages them to sketch their own experiences as medical students to improve their core doctoring skills.
Given the fraught relationship between doctors and patients in our country and the increasing erosion of patients’ trust in private medical centres, it may be a good idea to produce such comics and teach medical graphics here. Encouragingly enough, Grassroots Comics, which uses the medium of comics to educate people on social issues, especially in areas of low literacy, had conducted a comics workshop with doctors in Delhi’s All India Institute of Medical Sciences (IIMS) last year to highlight different aspects of doctor-patient dynamics.
The authors are affiliated to the National Institute of Technology, Tiruchi.
