Graphic Medicine
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Graphic Medicine Project: My Perfectly Imperfect Body and The Realities of Chronic Illnesses

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by Alaina Santiago My Perfectly Imperfect Body by Debbie Tung presents a graphic medicine memoir that dives into what it really means to live in a body that’s not cooperative. The story explores feelings of hardship, frustration, and what that experience looks like to the outside world. Similar to other graphic medicine works such as, Marbles: Mania, Depression, Michaelangelo, and Me by Ellen Forney, The Bad Doctor: The Troubled Life and Times of Benjamin Bennett, MD  by Ian Williams, and Taking Turns: Stories from HIV/AIDS Care Unit 371 by MK Czerwiec, the strength of these individuals cannot be understood through… Read More

My Perfectly Imperfect Body

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By Chloe Horning, Librarian Readers may be familiar with Debbie Tung from her earlier works of graphic autobiography. Book Love explores her love of reading. Quiet Girl in a Noisy World is about her experiences as an introvert. Her first foray into what we might call the Graphic Medicine space was Everything is Okay, a personal memoir of her struggles with anxiety and depression. My Perfectly Imperfect Body is a recounting of Debbie’s difficulties with disordered eating during her teen and early adult years. Tung’s visual style is gentle and soothing. Her figures are soft and rounded, with minimalistic features…. Read More

The EC Archives: Psychoanalysis

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by Matt Peters   The EC Archives: Psychoanalysis collects all four issues of the short-lived EC Comics series Psychoanalysis, which premiered and disappeared in a single year, 1955. The comic’s title referred to an approach to psychotherapy that Sigmund Freud developed in Austria in the late 1800s. In developing psychoanalysis, Freud held that early life experiences—particularly those involving trauma or unmet emotional needs—shape the unconscious mind in ways that affect a person’s moods and behaviors later in life. He believed that individuals often repress painful or socially unacceptable emotions, which then resurface as anxiety, depression, compulsive behaviors, or other disorders…. Read More

Five Reasons Why Cognitive Behavior Therapy Doesn’t Work

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by Mason Bennett Medical school is full to the brim with exams. Taking tests is a skill all on its own, and to survive, students resort to all sorts of techniques. Common ones are memorization, answer algorithms, and simple rules. One common saying was, “In any question that involves therapy, the correct answer is ALWAYS Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, or CBT.” While this rule was overly simplistic and missed out on nuances of different mental health treatments, it usually worked. To the minds of many in their early medical education, all they know is that CBT is the gold standard. So,… Read More

Medical Mentions Book Review XI

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Medical Mentions are a group of graphic works. The graphic works reviewed here are books whose primary topics are not medical, and yet they cover a medical topic with some depth at some point in the work. The rest of the work might be fictional or nonfictional, while the medical portion is often technical and five pages or more. The reviewer will usually neither recommend nor discourage reading the work, except when the rest of the work is deemed outstanding or terrible, respectively. Typically, six graphic works will be part of the review with one paragraph for each. Prior Medical Mentions… Read More

The Werewolf at Dusk and Other Stories

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by Jameson Rohrer Trigger warnings: nazi symbolism, depiction of death, depictions of blood The Werewolf at Dusk and Other Stories is a visually powerful, adaptation of three different short stories, yet having themes masterfully interwoven throughout the entirety. Author and illustrator David Small takes the reader on a melancholic unsettling journey through life’s later years, lurking monsters from within and associating with the various processes of aging. Using a specific color palette of greys, blues, with shades and instances of red throughout, it sets a tone for content and pulls you in rather quickly. The length of the three combined… Read More