The long-awaited Graphic Medicine Manifesto is now available for order from Penn State University Press!
“Something remarkable and game changing is being sparked by the alliance between comics and medicine. It’s becoming clear that these graphic narratives can deepen understanding, not only of facts but of feelings, between patients, families, and professionals. A spoonful of comics really does help the medicine go down.”
This inaugural volume in the Graphic Medicine series establishes the principles of graphic medicine and begins to map the field. The volume combines scholarly essays by members of the editorial team with previously unpublished visual narratives by Ian Williams and MK Czerwiec, and it includes arresting visual work from a wide range of graphic medicine practitioners. The book’s first section, featuring essays by Scott Smith and Susan Squier, argues that as a new area of scholarship, research on graphic medicine has the potential to challenge the conventional boundaries of academic disciplines, raise questions about their foundations, and reinvigorate literary scholarship—and the notion of the literary text—for a broader audience. The second section, incorporating essays by Michael Green and Kimberly Myers, demonstrates that graphic medicine narratives can engage members of the health professions with literary and visual representations and symbolic practices that offer patients, family members, physicians, and other caregivers new ways to experience and work with the complex challenges of the medical experience. The final section, by Ian Williams and MK Czerwiec, focuses on the practice of creating graphic narratives, iconography, drawing as a social practice, and the nature of comics as visual rhetoric. A conclusion (in comics form) testifies to the diverse and growing graphic medicine community. Two valuable bibliographies guide readers to comics and scholarly works relevant to the field.
About the authors:
MK Czerwiec is a nurse and comics artist. She is the artist-in-residence at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine. Her work can be seen at www.comicnurse.com
Ian Williams is a visual artist and illustrator, a medical doctor, and an independent humanities scholar. His most recent book is The Bad Doctor: The Troubled Life and Times of Dr. Iwan James.
Susan Merrill Squier is Brill Professor of Women’s Studies and English at Penn State.
Michael J. Green is a medical doctor and Professor of Humanities and Medicine at the Penn State College of Medicine.
Kimberly R. Myers is Associate Professor of Humanities at the Penn State College of Medicine.
Scott T. Smith is Associate Professor of English at Penn State.
I bought this for my medical library but there was no NLM classification inside it. I think that these important graphic novels and books about graphic medicine, etc., should have this classification. This one I ended up coding WZ 331 C998 2015, but most of them are WZ 336… Just FYI. 🙂
Thanks for this feedback, Amanda. I’ll be sure it gets back to the publisher. -MK