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Objective: Academic health science library catalogs were analyzed to determine the presence and frequency of graphic medicine titles in print format in the collections. The secondary objectives were to gauge if students could access graphic medicine titles, through other libraries within the same system or as eBooks, and to examine if libraries highlighted graphic medicine collections and their uses on their websites. Methods: A convenience sample of health science libraries was created from the Association of Academic Health Science Libraries member list. A title list was developed from collection resources and award lists for graphic medicine and graphic novels. Data was collected from public-facing library catalogs. Results: Fifty-six percent of the libraries analyzed had at least one title from the list in their collections available as print. An additional thirty percent had at least one title available as an eBook, leaving only fourteen percent with no graphic medicine titles. Conclusions: This study provides a starting point in describing the prevalence and breadth of graphic medicine collections in academic health science libraries. Although their presence may be small, our findings suggest that graphic medicine is being collected by academic health science libraries. Academic librarians can support the growing interest in the comic art format by incorporating graphic medicine into their collections and educating their patrons on this important genre.

From some of the earliest sequential cartoons that depicted morality tales of public health concerns in 18th-century England, to heroic medical comic books of the 1950s in the USA, through international activist comics from the HIV/AIDS pandemic, to present day graphic illness narratives, comics are a unique contribution to our understanding of illness and health. Harnessing the visual power of maps, diagrams, and symbols, while simultaneously depicting multiple perspectives, comics can delineate the social, bodily, and geographical boundaries that have been impacted by the virus, the reconfiguring of social interactions, and emotional responses to such things as physical distancing, isolation, and the risk of becoming infected. Shirlene Obuobi's comic about health-care workers on the COVID-19 front line Shirlene Obuobi Monica Lalanda's comic about the health workforce and COVID-19 in Spain Monica Lalanda Comics are also able to portray COVID-19 in the often unseen clinical spaces where the physical and emotional toll of the pandemic weighs heavily: the hospital rooms and intensive care units where health-care workers tend to the sick and dying and where patients with COVID-19, often intubated, may die without family and loved ones at their bedside. Taken together, these comics provide insights into the medical community's response to the pandemic, the challenges of rapidly adapting to a new and often riskier work environment, and the emotional and physical toll of their clinical work.

In Show Me Where It Hurts , Monica Chiu argues that graphic pathography-long-form comics by and about subjects who suffer from disease or are impaired-re-vitalizes and re-visions various negatively affected corporeal states through hand-drawn images. By the body and for the body, the medium is subversive and reparative, and it stands in contradistinction to clinical accounts of illness that tend to disembody or objectify the subject. Employing affect theory, spatial theory, vital materialism, and approaches from race and ethnic studies, women and gender studies, disability studies, and comics studies, Chiu provides readings of recently published graphic pathography. Chiu argues that these kinds of subjective graphic stories, by virtue of their narrative and descriptive strengths, provide a form of resistance to the authoritative voice of biomedicine and serve as a tool to foster important change in the face of social and economic inequities when it comes to questions of health and healthcare. Show Me Where It Hurts reads what already has been manifested on the comics page and invites more of what demands expression. Pathbreaking and provocative, this book will appeal to scholars and students of the medical humanities, comics studies, race and ethnic studies, disability studies, and women and gender studies.

Comics have always responded to pandemics/catastrophes, documenting the way we deal with such crises. Recently, graphic medicine, an interdisciplinary field of comics and medicine, has been curating comics, editorial cartoons, autobiographical cartoons, and social media posts under the heading \"COVID-19 Comics\" on their websites. These collected comics express what we propose to call covidity, a neologism that captures both individual and collective philosophical, material, and wide-ranging emotional responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. Treating such comics as the source material and drawing insights from theorists Ian Williams, Alan Bleakley, Susan Sontag, and others, this article examines graphic medicine's representation of the COVID-19 pandemic. The conceptual metaphors of war, anthropomorphism, and superheroism are used to represent and illustrate the lived experience of the pandemic, and the article investigates metaphor types, their utility, and motivational triggers for such representations. In doing so, the essay situates graphic medicine as a productive site that presents the pandemic's multifarious impact.

Researchers and artists reflect on the partnerships that have created career opportunities and forged a deeper public understanding of science. Researchers and artists reflect on the partnerships that have created career opportunities and forged a deeper public understanding of science.

Ageing, an inevitable biological process, is often oversimplified, subjecting elderly individuals to both positive and negative sociocultural stereotypes. Elderly individuals are stigmatised as passive, suffering and asexual, while simultaneously being expected to embody an active, successful and productive approach towards ageing. Departing from these narrow perceptions, this article draws examples from Zidrou and Aimée de Jongh’s graphic narrative Blossoms in Autumn to provide a nuanced perspective on the ageing process. Using the affordances of comics, this essay examines how Blossoms in Autumn addresses unarticulated aspects of ageing, including changing bodily features, sexuality and intimacy, among others. In so doing, this essay challenges the unilateral perceptions of ageing.

The purpose of this study was to assess the relationship between an embodied sensory experience and the ability to translate the perception of this experience visually using modifiable motion graphics. A custom-designed software was developed to enable users to modify a motion graphic in real-time. The motion graphics were designed to depict realistic visualizations of pain quality descriptors, such as tingling and burning. Participants (N = 34) received an electrical stimulation protocol known to elicit sensations of tingling. The protocol consisted of eight stimulation intensities ranging from 2-6mA delivered, in a randomized fashion and repeated three times, to the index finger. Immediately after each stimulus, participants drew the area of the evoked sensation on a digital body chart of the hand. Participants then modified the motion graphic of tingling by adjusting two parameters, namely the speed (rate of dots disappearing and re-appearing) and density of these dots in the drawn area. Then, participants rated the perceived intensity and selected the most appropriate pain quality descriptor. There was an increase in the area, density, and perceived intensity ratings as the electrical stimulation intensity increased (P<0.001). The density of the motion graphic, but not speed, correlated with perceived intensity ratings (0.69, P<0.001) and electrical stimulation intensities (0.63, P<0.01). The descriptor 'tingling' was predominantly selected in the range of 3-4.5mA and was often followed by 'stabbing' as the electrical intensity increased. The motion graphic tested was perceived to reflect a tingling sensation, the stimulation protocol elicited a tingling sensation, and participants adjusted one of the two motion graphic features systematically. In conclusion, an embodied sensation, such as tingling, maybe visually represented similarly between individuals. These findings create research, clinical, and commercial opportunities that utilize psychophysics to explore, visualize, and quantify changes in embodied sensory experiences in response to known stimuli.

In the broader societal context of the USA, examples of structural racism include discriminatory lending practices that continue to bar Black, Indigenous, and people of colour from home ownership and access to quality education and initiatives that place the burden of harmful environmental exposures on minoritised neighbourhoods or limit access to public transportation, public spaces, voting rights, and healthy food options. In contemporary health care, it includes the persistence of racialised medicine and science, unequal access to health care, clinical training programme ranking systems that disadvantage minority students, persistently disparate outcomes in Black maternal and infant mortality and any number of health and health-care disparities, and the continuing under-representation of communities of colour in academic medicine, health-care leadership, research, and on the boards of health-care organisations. In A Sense of Belonging, a comic published in The New England Journal of Medicine, physician Anita Blanchard discusses how racial disparities are driven by generational privilege, calling it the “oldest form of ‘affirmative action'” which “continues to challenge efforts to create a level playing field for physicians from minorities that are underrepresented in medicine”. In residency, however, her comics have become more outward looking and explore such topics as physician workflow, the difficulties of providing equitable patient care under the USA's current health insurance model, sexual harassment, physician wellness, and structural racism.

This article aims to examine the lived experiences of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) diagnosis in adulthood, emphasising its revelatory nature and diverse emotional responses it provokes. The diagnosis serves as a pivotal moment of self-discovery, often evoking feelings of validation and identity affirmation. However, it also triggers a complex array of emotions, including grieving for the childhood self, frustration with society’s failure to recognise the legitimate challenges and evolving self-concept post diagnosis. Through a close reading of digitally published comics by Laura Balcerek, Amber Lewis and Juliette Yu-Ming Lizeray, this article studies how the graphic medium conveys these nuanced experiences. By dissecting narrative and visual elements inherent in the comics, the article studies the affordances of the comic medium to capture the lived experiences of ADHD diagnosis in adulthood. Ultimately, this article intends to deepen understanding of the diverse lived realities and underscores the expressive potential of graphic narratives of neurodivergence.

This article explores three different comics by creators with brain tumors: Rick , written and drawn by Gordon Shaw; Going Remote , written by Adam Bessie and drawn by Peter Glanting; and Parenthesis , written and drawn by Élodie Durand. It examines how the affordances of the comics medium enables the creators to present an experience of subjective time that is multiple, diffuse, and contradictory, in contrast to the regular apportioning of time via calendars, schedules, and pathways essential to institutional neuro-oncology. The question of time here is significant because the side effects of brain tumors can include blackouts, seizures, and periods of extreme fatigue, during which the experience of time can be significantly disrupted. The title of the article therefore evokes a temporal duality: on the one hand, it refers to the common phrase used to describe what clocks do, as well as our ability to read them; on the other hand, it speaks to one of the most important qualities of graphic medicine, which is that it allows patients dealing with medical or health issues to tell time differently. The article explores the representation of personal time in Rick , social time in Going Remote , and lost time in Parenthesis .