Keywords/Keyimages in Graphic Medicine

by M.T. Bennett

“Graphic medicine” is not a term describing horrific injuries but instead examines the intersection of healthcare with visual media, primarily comics. As graphic medicine has matured from an emerging niche into an established interdisciplinary field, it has become increasingly important to explain or clarify what is “graphic medicine” This is where Keywords/Keyimages in Graphic Medicine (shortened to Keywords/Keyimages herein), edited by Lisa Diedrich and Briana Martino comes into play. This collection shares how health and illness can be communicated through a constellation of concepts, images, practices, and conversations.

The editors’ note in their introduction that, borrowing from Matthew Noe‘s observation that graphic medicine has moved “past the evangelism stage [pg. 1],” the field has reached a moment of reflection. The book is inspired by other collections of Keywords, but that with graphic visual media they have also added Keyimages as well, which seems the correct thing to do. Inspired by Raymond Williams’ Keywords, Diedrich and Martino adapt the cultural studies tradition into something uniquely suited to graphic medicine. Yet they immediately recognize the limitations of relying solely on “keywords” when discussing a medium built upon the interplay of text and image. Their neologism, Keyimages, is more than clever terminology. It reflects one of the central insights of graphic medicine: meaning emerges from the interaction between visual and verbal storytelling, and any vocabulary for the field must account for both.

However, this book has far fewer images than other books reviewed on this website. It isn’t a graphic novel, but a textbook about the subject. While it covers the subject of visual media it has far fewer images than one would expect, however each image included does serve an important purpose. Instead of defending the legitimacy of comics in healthcare, the volume asks what language and images we need to describe where graphic medicine is now and where it may be headed?

This commitment to hybridity shapes every aspect of the collection. Rather than organizing chapters alphabetically, the editors group thirty-seven contributions into five thematic sections which are alliteratively: Practice, Pedagogy, Process, Personal/Autobiographical, and Politics. The organization encourages readers to move across disciplines and methods rather than treating graphic medicine as a fixed body of knowledge. Cross-references between chapters reinforce this structure, making the volume feel less like an encyclopedia and more like an ongoing conversation.

The contributors themselves embody this philosophy. Contributing scholars write alongside physicians, cartoonists, disability activists, educators, and patients. The diversity of voices is one of the collection’s greatest strengths. The book allows multiple forms of expertise to coexist. The result is a volume that resists the rigid boundaries, often separating research, teaching, creative practice, and lived experience.

One particularly compelling aspect of the Introduction is the editors’ own demonstration of “keyimages.” Their discussion of recurring visual motifs such as eyes, mirrors, and lines, illustrates the important point that comics communicate ideas that cannot be reduced to prose. Eyes become metaphors for surveillance, shame, and recognition; mirrors explore identity and self-reflection; lines function simultaneously as compositional elements and representations of mental states and more. These examples establish an analytical vocabulary.

The Practice section emphasizes ways of reading graphic medicine. Rather than treating comics as transparent narratives of illness, contributors encourage readers to attend to metaphors, space, visual sequencing, and formal experimentation. Brian Fies’ reflections on Mom’s Cancer demonstrate how metaphor and visual structure create emotional resonance beyond literal depiction and create meaning on many layered levels. Fies turns readers’ attention to the mechanics of storytelling itself, demonstrating how visual metaphor can communicate “without the intrusion or overdetermination of text,” Another interesting example is Maia Kobabe’s exploration of non-adjacent sequence, which shows pages from Gender Queer that separated by nearly one hundred pages but can be paired through repeated colors, compositions, and themes create connections across a narrative independent of chronology. Again, showcasing the power of graphic medicine. The section examines other methods of visually telling a message through time, silhouettes, and more.

The Pedagogy section expands the discussion into education. Here the collection demonstrates why graphic medicine has become such an influential teaching tool. Rather than simply advocating for comics in medical education, contributors explore how comics foster empathy, critical thinking, visual literacy, and conversations about uncertainty. The emphasis is less on comics as educational supplements and more on comics as methods of inquiry. This distinction is subtle but important. Graphic medicine becomes not merely something to teach, but something through which teaching itself can be enhanced. One of the best examples was Judy Diamond, Bob Hall, and Aaron Sutherlen using fantasy and anthropomorphizing in their C’RONA Comics to teach about viruses in a way that would struggle in a non-visual format. Helping to teach points in a unique way that would be lost in a traditional textbook or journal article.

In the Process section artists discuss their own creative practices. Academic scholarship frequently analyzes finished comics but sometimes may overlook the complex decisions involved in making them. By inviting creators to reflect on drawing, composition, symbolism, revision, and visual storytelling, the editors reveal the intellectual labor embedded within artistic practice. For example, Juliet McMullin discusses how the process of creation isn’t just expressing information but creating meaning. Ellen Grabiner reminds readers that graphic narratives are carefully crafted representations rather than transparent windows into the exact experience. Personal experience becomes both subject matter and method which connects well to the next major section on Autobiographical insights. The chapters in the Process section underscore that graphic medicine is not simply about representing illness; it is also about developing visual languages capable of expressing the subject material.

The Personal/Autobiographical essays demonstrate why memoir remains central to graphic medicine without allowing autobiographies to dominate the field. Contributors explore lived experiences of disability, chronic illness, caregiving, and mental health while simultaneously reflecting on the formal choices that shape these narratives. Paul Flippen explains his difficulties watching drugs/medications treat his father, while Liz Argall focuses on her experience as a patient, and Savita Rani focuses on her experience being a medical provider. Each essay has an underlying current that creating a graphic autobiographical record helped them all work through different feelings of their experiences. From loss, identity, or disillusionment with medicine. This section demonstrate that autobiography in graphic medicine is not simply a record of lived experience but a means of interrogating memory, depicting a narrative, and reaching a reader through the unique combination of the visual and narrative language of comics.

The final section on Politics, or ways of doing, broadens the scope beyond individual experiences toward systems of healthcare, inequality, disability justice, environmental crisis, and reproductive rights. Ending with politics feels intentional. Throughout the volume, the editors suggest that graphic medicine has always been concerned with institutions as much as individuals. By concluding with structural critiques, the collection reminds readers that illness is never experienced in isolation from culture, policy, race, gender, economics, or power.

The collection reflects the current moment in graphic medicine scholarship. Contributors discuss graphic dissertations, community-based comics, pedagogical innovations, and collaborative artistic practices alongside more familiar graphic memoirs. In doing so, the book subtly argues that graphic medicine has entered a new phase of maturity. Rather than continually justifying comics’ legitimacy within medicine, scholars and creators are now expanding what comics themselves can accomplish.

That said, the collection’s ambitions occasionally create challenges. With thirty-seven contributors and multiple genres of writing, readers may find the volume uneven. Some entries offer sustained theoretical engagement, like Juliet McMullin’s chapter on Graphic Ethnography, while others function primarily as reflections on individual artistic practice, like Marianne R. Petit discussing the path from printmaking to creating anatomical flapbooks. Likewise, the thematic organization, while more accessible than alphabetical ordering, sometimes obscures potential connections among related concepts that appear across multiple sections. Fortunately, extensive cross-referencing using the subjects in the Index of Related Keywords/Keyimages partially alleviates this issue and encourages readers to navigate the book nonlinearly.

These minor concerns are ultimately outweighed by the collection’s originality. The concept of Keywords/Keyimages is not simply a new organizational strategy but a meaningful intervention into how scholars, artists, educators, patients, caregivers, and clinicians might think about graphic medicine itself. By insisting that images deserve status alongside words, Diedrich and Martino provide a framework uniquely suited to comics scholarship.

Perhaps most importantly, the editors resist presenting this collection as definitive. Throughout the introduction, they emphasize that the lexicon is necessarily incomplete, inviting readers to identify new Keywords and Keyimages as the field continues to evolve. This openness reflects the collaborative ethos that has long characterized graphic medicine. Rather than closing debates, the volume creates space for new ones.

For scholars, educators, healthcare professionals, artists, and longtime readers of graphic medicine, this volume will likely become an essential resource. More importantly, it demonstrates that the field’s next stage will not be defined by consensus but by continued dialogue and a conversation carried equally through language, image, and the rich spaces between them.

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M.T. Bennett has a degree in medical science and works in public health. He enjoys writing and spending time with his wife and three sons. Bennett is the author of “Dark and Bright: Poetry and Prose.” His poetry and articles have appeared in Intuition, Chiasm, Poet’s Choice, HEAL, America Media, In-Training, and KevinMD. Twitter handle: @BennettEmpty