Our latest Spotlight on projects and people within the Graphic Medicine international community focuses on a new comic field guide for global stroke care, by Dr. Hesham Masoud.
“The Stroke Interventionalists’ Manual” began as a personal creative outlet and became a demonstration of how clinical work, philosophical orientation, and systems-level storytelling can merge into a form of propaganda for medical education. Though not formally trained in illustration, Dr. Masoud has explored visual pedagogy before in a web-based illustrated children’s book on the vestibular system (How I Found My Balance, 2011). The manual reflects a continued interest in reclaiming communication methods, including those historically used for manipulation, and turning them toward public health, improved access, and personal action.
Context
The Stroke Interventionalists’ Manual was written and illustrated as an experiment in the repurposing of propaganda materials. Directly modeled on the aesthetic and tonal structure of a declassified CIA sabotage manual, the piece reframes stroke intervention as a tactical insurgency against cerebral tyranny from ischemia. The escalation of sabotage tactics in the original source material is mirrored by the escalation of stroke therapy from thrombolysis to mechanical thrombectomy.
The manual serves as both metaphor and literal propaganda, written to subvert the procedural hierarchies that limit vascular neurologists from training in thrombectomy. It is a call to arms for those with domain knowledge to reclaim procedural space without waiting for external gatekeeping structures to define paradigms of care or grant permission. This is subversion as a method of redistribution to increase healthcare capacity.
The Future
This work is the opening entry in a broader project that investigates what happens when narrative devices, media formats, and design tropes historically used for control and statecraft are reimagined for public health. Graphic medicine, in this context, is explored not as memoir or narrative of illness, but as a counter-media system capable of persuasion, agitation, and tactical reframing.
There are no formal plans, but the direction of this work points toward future manuals that may focus on stroke recognition, hemorrhagic disease, or other critical aspects of neurologic care. The intent is to produce work that poses broader questions: What if the language of coercion was hijacked for care? What if slogans could restore blood flow? No sleep ‘til TICI 3.
About The Author:
Dr. Hesham Masoud is a vascular and interventional neurologist based in Syracuse, NY. He is an Associate Professor of Neurology, Neurosurgery, and Radiology at SUNY Upstate Medical University, where he serves as Executive Director of the Upstate Simulation Center and Fellowship Director for the Vascular Neurology program. His work spans procedural stroke care, systems optimization, and simulation-based medical education.
Read the comic online at hmasoud.gumroad.com/l/zfpqzw
Contact Hesham Masoud at hmasoud@pm.me
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