An ARTFul Interpretation of Orthopedics The Gallery of ARTFul Medicine, Montefiore Medicine Hutchinson Metro Campus Marianne R. Petit, artist in collaboration with the Department of Orthopedics Sponsored by the Fine Art Program and Collection at Montefiore Einstein The Gallery of ARTFUl Medicine at Montefiore’s Hutchinson campus presents contemporary art within the unique context of a medical center. In its vision, exhibiting artists are “encouraged to interpret scientific and medical research and create works of art depicting issues of cultural, political, and technological significance.” As I toured the space last year with Jodi Moise, Director of the Fine Art Program and Collection at Montefiore Einstein,… Read More

The Drawing Together community convened once again on Sunday, August 28. Our session was led by Alice Jaggers. Alice is a watercolor and comics artist, Mom to Riley, co-editor of the Graphic Medicine website, and host of the Graphic Medicine podcast. She is also a former medical librarian. Alice first became obsessed with graphic medicine in 2015 and has not stopped since! Alice read three passages intended to invoke an emotion. Our instruction was to listen to the passage and a song that follows while drawing. She isn’t telling us what the emotion she has in mind for the passage is, she’d… Read More

  The Harvard Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study will be mounting an exhibition this fall titled Drawing Us Together: Public Life and Public Health in Contemporary Comics. The interactive exhibition will feature a library of over 80 publications, including several graphic medicine titles. From Meg Rotzel, Curator of Exhibits, I’d like to invite you to join us for the virtual opening discussion on September 22 for the exhibition featuring cartoonists and scholars Hillary Chute, Joel Christian Gill, and James Sturm. We will discuss comics and their ability to tell stories across time, experience, and identity. You  may learn more about… Read More

guest post by Elizabeth Lakoma My name is Elizabeth Lakoma, and I am currently an undergraduate student at Northwestern University studying Chemistry and Biology – in my free time, I love to draw, make art, and doodle in the margins. I created this comic as an assignment for one of my college seminars, titled “Science and the Scientist: How we communicate complex ideas, from comic books to journal articles”, where we were prompted to describe a scientific concept through creative media. I am really interested in recent developments in cancer clinical trials. A few years ago, when one of my uncles was diagnosed… Read More

Call for Submissions for Graphic RHM   The Rhetoric of Health and Medicine journal is thrilled to announce that there will be a new digital column for the journal that is dedicated to all things graphic medicine and RHM! Co-editors J. Blake Scott and Catherine Gouge are now calling for submissions, and full details can be found here: http://medicalrhetoric.com/announcement-and-call-for-submissions-for-graphic-rhm/ If you are interested in learning more about graphic medicine and RHM, the editors will also be offering two workshops this fall, where you will be able to develop ideas for submissions and work on drafts. These workshops will take place near… Read More

guest post by Amaris Ketcham In 2021, I began drawing diary comics about undergoing in vitro fertilization (IVF) to keep my family and friends updated on the various appointments, procedures, and milestones. I hadn’t drawn much before, but comics seemed like the perfect medium to relate the experience of IVF, which itself is like a biology lesson in wonder and disappointment. Comics provided a unique way to capture the hilarity and oddity of new experiences, such as relocating sperm across town or trying to give yourself a shot in the butt. “Hysterical Problems” is hastily drawn in real time—and is… Read More

The Drawing Together community convened again on Sunday, July 31. Our session was led by Josh Feder and his three-year old sheepdog, Charlie. Josh and Charlie are a family psychiatry team from San Diego California with a focus on autism in the US and on trauma internationally. Their cartoon-based approach to helping children impacted by armed conflict is currently scaling up across Northern Ireland with pilot projects in the Middle East and the Balkan regions. Josh spoke at the Vermont Graphic Medicine conference on Sorting out Suicide and he’s the managing editor of the upcoming book Graphic Truths which captures the… Read More

guest post by Kathleen Founds  My bear began as a scribble on a scrap of paper–a tiny cartoon I drew for the amusement of a friend in a grad school fiction writing class. (At the age of 26, I was probably too old to be passing notes. In my defense, the classes were three hours long, and doodling in the margins of my notebook helped me sit still.) The little cartoon was titled “Bipolar Bear.” It had two panels. In one, a manic bear declares, with expansive hand gestures, “I’m the king of the forest!” In the other panel, the… Read More

On Sunday, June 26th  the Drawing Together community again gathered. Our session was led by GMIC board member Susan Squier. Susan is Brill Professor Emerita of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and English at Pennsylvania State University. She is the author of many books and a co-author of the Graphic Medicine Manifesto. You can read her full bio here. For our opening exercise, Susan asked us to consider summer as a season of gatherings – graduations, picnics, parades, reunions, vacations. Susan invited us to bring to mind one particular summer gathering, one that nourished or challenged us, real or fictional,… Read More

Our journeys to Graphic Medicine and our research communities may vary, but those of us who come to this community, both in-person and virtually, have by now come to share an understanding of what Graphic Medicine is and how it is relevant to our everyday lives.   When our colleague in Ireland, Jane Burns, initially started working on her PhD, she was focused on Medical Humanities and Archives as her research area. Being diagnosed with uterine cancer months prior to commencing her PhD put things on hold.  Her husband and both of her children were obviously worried, but it was… Read More