On Thursday, May 22nd, Ian Williams and John Miers will be in Amsterdam to give a double lecture on Graphic Medicine.
The hybrid event, hosted by the PULSE Network as part of their ongoing lecture series on the Medical and Health Humanities, will take place on from 14:00-16:00 (British Summer Time) / 15:00-17:00 (Central European Summer Time)
The physical location for the event is the University of Amsterdam, Bushuis E1.02. For those interested in attending virtually, you can add your name and email address to this form, after which you will be sent a link for joining online.
See below for more information about each talk and speaker:
‘We can’t all be upstanding citizens: Metaphors of Disability’
John Miers
The metaphors that are pervasive in any society reflect its grounding assumptions and ideologies. In contemporary English discourse, idioms that assess an individual’s social value coalesce around their ability to assert control over one’s physiology: “morally upright” individuals are those who can “stand on their own two feet”. Disability scholar S. Kay Toombs (1995), reflecting on how the observable effects of multiple sclerosis transformed assessments of her social value, observes that her loss of upright posture caused others to treat her as dependent. Being labelled as “dependent” on care, medical treatment, or state benefits, places one at odds with the neoliberal imperatives of autonomy, self-sufficiency, and economic productivity (Goodley, Liddiard and Runswick-Cole, 2018).
In their initial presentation of conceptual metaphor theory, which argues that cognition is grounded in bodily experience, and which has been used extensively in analyses of common idioms like the one presented above, Lakoff and Johnson (2003) acknowledged the ethically problematic nature of assuming a notion of normalcy in relation to embodiment. However, despite four and a half decades of scholarship building on their insights the question of changes in embodiment over the life cycle and its implications for how diverse bodies and the individuals who inhabit them are discursively constructed has rarely been addressed (El Refaie, 2019). Drawing on disability and metaphor theory, and my own experience of living with multiple sclerosis, I summarise how the accumulation of physical impairments casts the “lived body” as a lens through which internal and external conceptions of self worth are critically reevaluated, and ask participants to join me in developing new idioms that promote interdependence over individualism.
References
El Refaie, E. (2019) Visual Metaphor and Embodiment in Graphic Illness Narratives. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Goodley, D., Liddiard, K. and Runswick-Cole, K. (2018) ‘Feeling disability: theories of affect and critical disability studies’, Disability & Society, 33(2), pp. 197–217. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/09687599.2017.1402752.
Lakoff, G. and Johnson, M. (2003) Metaphors We Live By. 2nd edn. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Toombs, S.K. (1995) ‘The Lived Experience of Disability’, Human Studies, 18(1), pp. 9–23.
About Johh Miers
John Miers is Senior Lecturer in Illustration at Kingston School of Art and postdoctoral researcher in the European Research Council consolidator grant “Where are the Humanities in the Medical Humanities? How Comics Can Improve Healthcare Training, Practice, and Dissemination.” He is the author of Visual Metaphor and Drawn Narratives: Embodied Cognition and Expression in Comics (Palgrave, in press). His comics depicting experiences of living with Multiple Sclerosis have been recognised in artistic (Broken Frontier, Myriad First Graphic Novel) awards and appeared in scholarly volumes (Graphic Medicine, University of Hawai’i Press) nominated for Eisner and Council of Editors of Learned Journals awards.
‘The Diagnostic Moment in Cancer Comics’
Ian Williams
Diagnosis is ‘a clinical act par excellence’ say Jutel and Dew (2014, 8). It is also, they go on to explain, a social activity. While a diagnosis can explain, it can also stigmatise, terrify, and change the patient’s identity. The moment of diagnosis is dramatic: the end of the first act in a patient’s narrative, marking the move from the normal into the changed world. Patients, particularly those given a life altering diagnosis, often come to think of their lives as cleaved into two parts: the ‘before’ and the ‘after’ (Fleischman, 1999,10).
In 2015 I was given a cancer diagnosis, by phone, in an unscheduled call, during an afternoon drinking session at a bar in East London. The specialist was clearing his desk and had had the result of the biopsy for several weeks. I had heard nothing, and had told myself that this meant things were OK, while at the same time not wanting to chase the result in case things were not. I have used my own cancer story as inspiration for my third graphic novel: The Sick Doctor
(forthcoming).
This moment of drama is present in nearly all autobiographical comics which deal with disease, and especially powerful in those that involve cancer or other potentially lethal diseases. The act is often not done well, and, while best practice protocols exist, if the stories are anything to go by, they are rarely adhered to. These comics make me wonder how good or bad I have been in past deliveries to my own patients. It is a moment of extreme power imbalance, where the professional holds all the information. I wonder how many professionals feel a subtle thrill in the run up to the pronouncement. I will look at the moment of cancer diagnosis in a number of autobiographical comics, as well as my own work in progress, and examine how, in each case, the diagnosis was given, how the patients may have tried to control the way in which they received the news and the
visual techniques used to articulate the emotions felt (or not) at the moment of diagnosis.
References
Fleischman, Suzanne (1999) “I Am…, I Have…, I Suffer From…” A Linguist Reflexts on theLanguage of Illness and Disease.” Journal of Medical Humanities 20(1): 3–32.
Jutel, Annemarie Goldstein and Dew, Kevin, eds. (2014) Social Issues in Diagnosis. Johns Hopkins UP.
Williams, Ian (forthcoming 2025). The Sick Doctor. Myriad Editions.
About Ian Williams
Ian Williams is an award-winning comics artist, educator, and doctor who lives in Brighton. His graphic novel, The Bad Doctor, was published in 2014 and followed up in 2019 by The Lady Doctor. Both were critically acclaimed and he is working on his third, for the same publishers, provisionally entitled The Sick Doctor, which will be published in 2025. He studied Fine Art after
medical school and then became involved in the Medical Humanities movement. He named the area of study called Graphic Medicine, building the eponymous website in 2007, which he currently co-edits. He is a founding member of the not-for-profit Graphic Medicine International Collective and co-author of the Eisner-nominated Graphic Medicine Manifesto. He has been the
recipient of several grants has contributed to numerous medical, humanities, and comics publications, and has sat on the board of a number of arts and humanities organisations.
I don’t seem to be able to access the form but would like to attend.
Any help gratefully received.