Czerwiec MK, Williams I., Squier S.M., Green M.J., Myers K.R., Smith S.T. Graphic Medicine Manifesto

University Park: Penn State University Press, 2015. — 204 p.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 The volume combines scholarly essays by members of the editorial team with previously unpublished visual narratives by Ian Williams and MK Czerwiec, and it includes arresting visual work from a wide range of graphic medicine practitioners.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.
Introduction: Welcome to the Graphic Medicine Manifesto
Who Gets to Speak?: The Making of Comics Scholarship
The Uses of Graphic Medicine for Engaged Scholarship
Graphic Storytelling and Medical Narrative: The Use of Comics in Medical Education
Graphic Pathography in the Classroom and the Clinic: A Case Study
Comics and the Iconography of Illness
The Crayon Revolution
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Comics Bibliography
Author Biographies and Acknowledgments
Credits