Graphic medicine, the intersection between comics and healthcare, is increasingly used in medicine to communicate complex information in a concise manner.
Invited to give two talks this summer at this year’s conference in Athlone, Ireland, Vinald Francis, a biomedical illustrator at Geisel School of Medicine and his collaborator Rebecca Gardner, MD, a physician-researcher at Brown University’s medical school, presented their recent work. One comic on bedside language was published in the New England Journal of Medicine last year, and the other, a comic on bedside rounding for medical students is part of an ongoing research study conducted by Gardner.
“It was an exciting conference, and I was honored to represent Dartmouth in the burgeoning field of graphic medicine,” Francis says of the experience that also included a collaboration with Shontay Delalue, PhD, MPH’24, senior vice president and senior diversity officer at Dartmouth. In addition to her administrative role, Delalue teaches in Geisel’s Master of Public Health residential program and received her master’s degree in public health from Geisel’s hybrid program this past spring.
“Shontay and I submitted our work-in-progress for inclusion in the conference, and it was accepted,” Francis says. “Our presentation was well received, and we got several opportunities to follow up with colleagues in the U.S. and Europe once our comic is published.”
“Our comic draws upon my research in medical misogynoir, which is the intersection of racism and sexism in healthcare, to create a visual teaching tool that extends beyond an academic paper,” Delalue explains. “The comic explores the medical treatment and exploitation of Black women in the U.S. from the 1800s - 2000s.”
Illustrating three centuries of medical misogynoir, the medical comic draws inspiration from real life events such as the “father of modern gynecology,” James Marion Sims, who performed nonconsensual procedures on enslaved Black women and girls as young as 14 years old without anesthesia. Sims believed that Black people did not feel pain.
“Artist Michelle Browder has curated a phenomenal museum with an outdoor art installation in Alabama honoring the three enslaved women Sims conducted the majority of procedures on: Anarcha, Betsey, and Lucy,” says Delalue who was able to visit the museum in April.
“Through my research I found that Browder refers to these enslaved women as the “mothers of gynecology”—turning that traditional narrative on its head,” Francis adds. “Similarly, our comic centers voices that have too often been silenced.”
The combination of pictures and words can be both disarming and engaging as they draw people to information in a way that can’t be achieved through text alone. Francis believes more people are beginning to understand the value of medical comics as a valuable teaching tool.
“There are a lot of public health and medical implications in using graphic medicine and for good reason because of the accessibility of the format, especially with topics that are difficult to engage with, such as health disparities,” Francis notes. “The healthcare profession is realizing that a creative way to educate medical learners and the general public is through the use of medical comics where people are able to more readily engage with and comprehend complex information in this format.”
