TORONTO—You might only associate comics with superheroes, but a fairly new trend in graphics has emerged that gets to the heart of the matter.

And unlike highly detailed drawings of hearts and other organs that you may see on doctor's office walls or in medical textbooks, graphic medicine — a term that was coined by Ian Williams in the UK  —  is more about tugging at the heartstrings.

Graphic medicine is the use of comics in healthcare. Unlike medical drawings, comics can tell a story about a medical experience to humanize a patient in the eyes of medical professionals, explained Shelley Wall, assistant professor of biomedical communications at University of Toronto Mississauga.


"There's lots of emphasis on statistics and learning the molecular basis of disease, for example," said Wall. "Sometimes human elements get lost." That being said, graphic novels about health experiences are being used in some universities to teach medical students about what patients go through. Wall pointed out that Penn State assigns its medical students to draw their own comics, whether they are good at drawing or not, to tell stories about their own experiences.

The comics can also be used as an educational tool for patients who may have reading barriers, she added. "There's a lot you can capture with images that you can't with words, such as the look on someone's face," said Wall.

Those who create graphic medicine comics don't have to be trained in healthcare, said Wall. Several veteran comic creators have used their creative abilities to tell their health story. For example, Harvey Pekar, late American writer of comic book series American Splendor, collaborated on a graphic novel called Our Cancer Year to tell the story of his battle with the disease.

Wall herself has become a comic book artist. While she brings an impressive mix of artistic and scientific training to the table — PhD in English literature, degree in drawing/painting from OCAD, Master of Science from U of T, along with experience creating biomedical illustrations at SickKids hospital — she said switching from highly-technical drawing to simpler pencil and ink comic book renderings was a challenge.


There's some room for creativity in traditional medical illustration, said Wall, but "at its core is accuracy." On the other hand, she had to "invent" the look of some of the characters for a chapter called My Quest for Health (written by Michael Sappol), which will appear in a publication entitled Health and Humanities Reader to be published later this year by Rutgers University Press. "Comics give more artistic license," she said. "But that's the fun of it — it's all about the story."

Comics also typically contain dialogue within word bubbles; Wall used a font called Daniel to accomplish a handwritten look to the type.

To take her involvement in graphic medicine another step, she is the organizer for this year's Comics & Medicine conference to take place at University of Toronto from July 22-24 (the conference was originally held in London, UK and then Chicago).

There's a long slate of speakers at the conference including academics, medical educators and others presenting their own autobiographies of medical experiences, she said.