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Graphic Medicine in Public Health

Getting Started with Graphic Medicine in Public Health

Liaison: Meredith Li-Vollmer

About me:

Hi, I’m Meredith Li-Vollmer and I’m a cartoonist and author of Graphic Public Health: A Comics Anthology and Roadmap. My day job is working at the health department in Seattle and King County, Washington, where I’m a senior communications strategist. As part of this work, I make comics to make complex public health issues relatable and engaging. I’ve had the very good fortune to collaborate with many comics artists on public health stories and they in turn have mentored me as a comics creator.

We’ve made comics about pandemics, toxic chemicals, climate change, and overdose prevention. Recently, I’ve been focusing on co-creating graphic narratives with people in my community who have been affected by pressing public health concerns, including Long COVID, gun violence prevention, and healthcare access.  My comics have been published in Illustrated PEN America, Crucial Comix, the American Journal of Public Health, and my most notorious comic, “What to do if there’s a Rat is in the Toilet” made it into the New York Times, The Guardian, and even The New York Post (I mean, rats in toilets kind of sell themselves!).  I’m also a board member for Short Run Comix and Arts and a clinical assistant professor at the University of Washington’s School of Public Health.

Contact: Find me via email at meredith.li-vollmer@kingcounty.gov or my Instagram account @graphicpublichealth.

My Graphic Medicine Origin Story:

Avian flu was my side door into comics. When I started at the public health department in Seattle, I was charged with promoting preparedness for a possible flu pandemic. In 2007, few people were aware of how catastrophic a global pandemic could be—we were so innocent then! And frankly, it was challenging to get anyone to pay attention to—let alone make plans for—an event that seemed so improbable at the time.

Then I read Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics, sparking excitement about narrative possibilities for public health communications.

In 2008, I hired Seattle cartoonist David Lasky (who would later publish the Eisner award-winning Carter Family: Remember This Song). With David as the artist, I wrote No Ordinary Flu, a comic book telling the story of a family that lived through the 1918 influenza pandemic. To help readers visualize how this public health disaster could happen again, the comic also showed their descendants planning for a future pandemic. Over ten years later, scenes from No Ordinary Flu eerily played out as we lived through a global pandemic caused by a different deadly virus.

No Ordinary Flu Cover

David and I continued to collaborate on comics projects, and we joined a local reading group that included cartoonists and comics scholars who shared our interest in comics and health. With their encouragement, I started to create my own comics as an artist as well as writer.

I attended my first Comics & Medicine conference in Baltimore in 2014. I was stunned to find hundreds of other people around the world who were shared an interest in the intersection of comics and health (and to see attendees live sketching sessions instead of taking notes on laptops!). And it was especially gratifying to meet others who made public health comics, like Whit Taylor.

Since that conference, the field of graphic medicine has blossomed in so many directions. And more than a decade after we first created No Ordinary Flu, the proliferation of amazing comics about the COVID-19 pandemic demonstrated that everyone has a public health story to tell.

The intersection of comics and public health:

Comics have been used for public health purposes for decades. For example, in the 1980s and 90s, comics such as “The Adventures of Bleachman” and “AIDS News,” were used as outreach by activists and health agencies as the AIDS crisis unfolded. Global health initiatives also used comics to convey health information about HIV, as well as wide range of topics—such as immunization, water-borne diseases, guinea worm disease—especially to young people. Global health workers have also involved engaging youth in developing their own comics as a way of educating about pressing health concerns. The CDC has even launched zombie comic books to promote readiness for public health emergencies.

Didactic educational comics have been the most common in public health, and it’s easy to see how comics can be an effective medium for illustrating public health concepts. The visual vocabulary of images, expository text, dialogue, and sequenced panels can clearly and economically convey complex public health information, such as how flu viruses are transmitted or how epidemiologists track disease outbreaks.

Increasingly public health comics are taking more narrative form, including comics journalism, comics about public health history, and stories about people who are impacted by public health issues. In contrast to other visual forms of health communication—such as pictograms or illustrated diagrams—comics can harness emotion and empathy through its unique storytelling elements. And emotion and empathy are needed to tackle big picture issues about what makes populations and communities healthy, like the lack of safe biking routes or impact of sexual harassment on health.

Why Now? by Meredith Li-Vollmer

 

What makes Graphic Public Health distinct?

The disciplines of public health and medicine overlap, as do the comics in these two fields. Both deal with the causes and prevention of illness, policy issues related to healthcare, and to some extent, treatment in clinical settings. But public health is also population health, distinct from medical practice, healthcare interactions, or medicine as a discipline.  Public health places greater emphasis on the structures, systems, and institutions that shape health outcomes, especially the factors that make some people much healthier than others.

Some comics in public health—such as those that educate about pandemic influenza or the benefits of vaccination—overlap readily with graphic medicine. Other public health comics don’t touch on illness, medical treatment, interactions between patients and providers, caregiving, or anything else directly tied to the healthcare system. Examples of published comics that live just outside the discourse of medicine are those addressing the implications of racist housing policies on access to food and outdoor activity, the benefits of food inspection systems, or the impact of climate change on health. Health is at the center of these comics, but they don’t necessarily intersect with healthcare.

From “Climate Changes Health” by Public Health – Seattle & King County (artwork by Mita Mahato, written by Meredith Li-Vollmer).

“Graphic public health” may be a more descriptive term than “graphic medicine” for this subset of comics. I also use the term graphic public health to hail and welcome the many public health professionals who don’t identify as working within healthcare or medicine.

That’s not to say that graphic public health is a break from graphic medicine. On the contrary, public health issues have always been part of graphic medicine, even if the semantics defined the field as healthcare. Numerous comics presented at every Graphic Medicine conference have incorporated public health concerns or have been used explicitly for public health purposes. Public health issues frequently arise in online discussions of graphic medicine. Graphic medicine and graphic public health frequently share the same mission of promoting better understanding and fuller conversations about health.

By using the term graphic public health, I hope to attract and encourage more public health compatriots to consider the use of comics in communications efforts and to contribute their own comics that tell stories from the field.

Key texts, reading suggestions, and resources:

Graphic public health readings

Graphic public health educational materials

Comics journalism on public health issues

Graphic public health stories

Other resources

 

“Developed resources reported in this [publications, press releases, internet sites] are supported by the National Library of Medicine (NLM), National Institutes of Health (NIH) under cooperative agreement number UG4LM012347. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.”