You may have read a book within the graphic medicine genre without even knowing it. It’s defined as “The intersection between the medium of comics and the discourse of healthcare.” It’s a broad category that includes instructional comics, graphic memoirs, and graphic fiction written about experiencing a physical or mental illness, working in the healthcare field, or caring for a loved one.
The phrase “graphic medicine” was coined by Ian Williams, doctor and comics artist, back in 2007 when he started a blog by the same name. There’s been an annual conference on graphic medicine since 2010 across the world, though 2025 was a hiatus year. In 2022, the Graphics Medicine International Collective, co-founded by Ian Williams, established the Graphic Medicine Award, “to recognize and honor outstanding health-related comic projects published in the previous year.”
Why Graphic Medicine?
Combining graphics and text can be very powerful. Williams cited Scott McCloud, cartoonist and author of Understanding Comics, who suggested the marriage of text and images is greater than the sum of its parts. “There’s a kind of audience participation involved in reading a sequential narrative,” Williams said. “You’re reading the sequential panels, and then your brain is animating those [panels] into something that comes alive in your imagination.”
Williams is particularly interested in autobiographical graphic novels and memoirs in the area. “I think that they just find new and original ways of articulating that experience,” he said. “It’s sort of coming up with original ways of getting the information over.” It’s creating new knowledge, he explained.
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