Spotlight: Savita Rani | Graphic Medicine

Guest Post by Savita Rani

Savita Rani is a physician by training and artist by spirit. She is a Desi woman and a first-generation immigrant settler in Canada. She is a resident physician in Public Health and Preventive Medicine at the University of Saskatchewan, and also has a Master of Public Health from Queen’s University. She has a special interest in bringing arts and humanities into medical education and public health as tools for practice, teaching, learning and reflection. Her poetry, writing and artwork have been published in international health humanities journals including Ars Medica, Pulse, and Intima: a Journal of Narrative Medicine.

The content of my Graphic Medicine work started out describing and working through challenges and struggles related to my medical training. In fact, my journey into Graphic Medicine (and health humanities more generally) came out of a feeling of being failed by allopathic medicine from a professional-in-training and patient standpoint, and my need to find connection, community and a place of solace within medicine. The feeling evolved into an understanding that this failure was by design, given that medicine is grounded in oppressive, hierarchical, heteropatriarchal, and colonial structures. I use the medium of comics as a direct response and resistance to the rigidity and dogma of the medical hegemony.

I hand-draw my comics and have a love for typography- and layout-focused work. I also enjoy using the mini-zine format in my work!