What is Graphic Medicine

You probably already like graphic medicine. You just don’t know it yet.

My name is Ryan Montoya. I am a family medicine physician and a comic book artist, working in two fields that aren’t as disparate as you might think. I spend my days in clinic talking with patients, listening to their stories, and trying to help them make sense of complicated things happening in their lives and bodies. Then I go home and draw comics that try to do exactly the same thing.

That overlap is where graphic medicine lives.

Graphic medicine is, quite simply, comics about medicine. These stories can come from patients, family members, physicians, nurses, caregivers, or anyone who has found themselves inside the strange, emotional, frustrating, and occasionally beautiful world of healthcare. If you have ever read a comic about illness, recovery, caregiving, addiction, disability, or the healthcare system, you have already encountered graphic medicine - you just didn’t know the label.

Storytelling is fundamental to medicine. And I posit that if you are in the healthcare field at any level, from student to resident to attending, you are a gifted storyteller by default. When you sign out a patient, you need to know what elements paint a picture to another healthcare provider, how to edit the unnecessary details, how to drive the action with specific, diagnosis-altering information. Graphic medicine, when told by anyone interacting with the healthcare field, employs all of these ideas in the exact same way. Comics combine words and images to tell stories in a way that is direct, emotional, and incredibly accessible. A single panel can show fear, confusion, exhaustion, or hope, and the visual directness of comics invites empathy in readers in a way no other medium can.

Over the next year I am finishing my own graphic novel, titled Precipitated Withdrawal. It is a story rooted in American primary care, addiction medicine, and the complicated reality of trying to do good work inside a healthcare system that can make it impossible. It has taken years to reach this stage and finishing it will require a massive final push. So I thought I would do something a little unusual.

At Hippocratic Collective, aside from highlighting other examples of Graphic Medicine, I am going to document the process of finishing my graphic medicine comic in real time. Page by page. Script drafts. Sketches. Revisions. Editorial headaches. The occasional moment of artistic triumph. And yes, all the highs and lows and bullsh—, er, challenges that come with trying to publish a comic book while also practicing medicine.

If you are curious about graphic medicine, this will be a front row seat. If you are an artist, a writer, or a healthcare worker who has ever thought about telling medical stories through comics, I hope this will make the process feel a little less mysterious. And if you simply enjoy stories about the strange human drama that unfolds in exam rooms every day, you will probably find something interesting here too. My goal is simple. I want to show how these comics get made and why they matter.

And if this journey inspires you to go read more graphic medicine along the way, please remember where you heard about it first. I will happily accept the credit.