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

Introduction

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.

Current Challenges

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.

Project Overview

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.

Objectives

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
• comics artists
• patients
• their families
• carers
• the public

Methodology

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 reach to multiple stakeholders who can use the project’s findings for future research.

Importance

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.