As an outsider to the medical profession, I was struck by how doctors spoke openly with each other about their experience of human connection, triumph and the feelings of horror and honour at bearing witness to the most troubling experiences within life’s spectrum of extremes. In the spring of 2017, I attended an event at which my spouse won a Professional Association of Residents of Ontario award for his work as a physician and teacher of internal medicine. More often than not, the genre will push back against authoritative, official or sanitized written medical literature, exploring instead the subjective experience and emotional aspect of being a caregiver or patient. Graphic medicine can challenge the conventional appearance of medicine by exploring what it feels like to do work in which life and death are at stake, or how it feels to live inside a compromised body. Inside these narratives, the reader is given the opportunity to reflect on how personal identity, power and authority, subjectivity, politics, culture and society affect the practice of medicine. Graphic medicine, on the other hand, shows how patients and caregivers are complex and human. Scientific medicine determines which facts, disease concepts or medical treatments are right or wrong. Graphic medicine explores the emotional and moral dimensions of experience. Over the past several decades, artists have expanded the “comics” genre to include themes once thought of as belonging solely to the arena of literature.

This burgeoning area of medical humanities is part of growing popular interest in graphic storytelling generally. Graphic medicine is a form of visual storytelling that explores narratives of the body, health care, healing and disability. CMAJ will soon begin publishing graphic medicine articles in its Humanities section.

In-Between Days by Teva Harrison