Graphic Medicine & Comics in Healthcare

Some of the alternate terms for the field of graphic medicine include graphic pathography, graphic narratives (limited by topic), comics (limited by topic), photonovel (limited by topic), and related terms in other languages, such as (for example) bandes dessinées or photoroman in French. Searching these terms and phrases in PubMed results in thousands of articles. You might want to refer to "Mapping the Use of Comics in Health Education: A Scoping Review of the Graphic Medicine Literature" by Matthew Noe and Leonard Levin for a more detailed overview. 

Some of the most common applications of existing works of graphic medicine in practice include healthcare professional training and education, therapeutic interventions, public health interventions, and health literacy outreach and promotion. Some of the most intriguing and creative applications include using comics for improving informed consent, scenario forecasting and planning, community engagement, process-oriented job training materials, and more. On this page, you will find selected highlights. 

Graphic public health, to oversimplify, is the application of graphic medicine content and approaches to communicating about public health issues, building health literacy, and engaging the public around health issues and topics. The two examples highlighted here are the work of the Seattle/King County Department of Health mostly coordinated by Meredith Li-Vollmer, and Tested, the Comic from the New York State, Department of Health, AIDS Institute.