Keywords/Keyimages in Graphic Medicine

This book invites readers to explore the field of graphic medicine through a new concept: “keywords/keyimages.” Coined by the editors to reflect the unique combination of words and images in comics, this term offers a fresh way to understand how graphic narratives communicate experiences of health and illness. Rather than defining the field, the book aims to demonstrate its range and complexity, offering a visual and verbal resource that reveals the methods, concepts, and politics shaping graphic medicine today.

The collection brings together thirty-six contributions from comics artists, scholars, healthcare professionals, and patients, each focused on a single keyword/keyimage. Organized into five thematic sections—practice, pedagogy, process, personal/autobiographical, and politics—the book guides readers through the formal elements of comics, teaching strategies, creative processes, personal storytelling, and the broader health politics at work in the field. With visual examples alongside critical analysis, the volume encourages a “both/and” approach to reading: seeing words and images as interdependent, working simultaneously and sequentially to convey meaning.

Designed as a resource for classroom teaching and independent study, Keywords/Keyimages in Graphic Medicine offers students, scholars, and practitioners a dynamic introduction to the study of health narratives in comics. It invites interdisciplinary exploration while providing practical tools for analyzing, teaching, and creating graphic medicine texts, making it a valuable contribution to courses in comics studies, visual culture, health humanities, and beyond.

“This is not your typical keywords book. Diedrich and Martino have curated an exceptional and timely volume that engages readers in the possibilities and understandings of graphic medicine. Through a visual and textual diversity of approaches that explore experiences with health and medicine, Keywords/Keyimages celebrates our differences and our shared humanity, providing new perspectives through which we can reflect on and, ultimately, reshape the structures that define health and healing.”—Juliet McMullin, author of The Healthy Ancestor: Embodied Inequalities and the Revitalization of Native Hawaiian Health

Lisa Diedrich is Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Stony Brook University. She is the author of Illness Politics and Hashtag Activism; Indirect Action: Schizophrenia, Epilepsy, AIDS, and the Course of Health Activism; and Treatments: Language, Politics, and the Culture of Illness.

Briana Martino is Associate Professor and Chair of Communications and affiliated faculty in Race, Gender, and Culture in the Gwen Ifill School of Media, Humanities, and Social Sciences at Simmons University. Their research has been published in MAI: Feminism and Visual Culture and Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies.

Contents

Contents by Author

Contents in Alphabetical Order

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Lisa Diedrich and Briana Martino

Section 1: Practice (Ways of Reading)

1 Body Maps

MK Czerwiec and Ebru Ustundag

2 IVF

Luke C. Jackson and Patrick West

3 Metaphor

Brian Fies

4 Non-Adjacent Sequence

Maia Kobabe

5 OCD

Emmy Waldman and Jason

Adam Katzenstein

6 Silhouettes

David Lasky

7 Space/Time

Brian Fies

8 Subtext

Brian Fies

9 Unflattening

Justin Wigard

Section 2: Pedagogy (Ways of

Teaching and Learning)

10 Anatomical Illustration

Shelley Wall

11 Cancer

A. David Lewis

12 Chronic Pain

Amritha Radhakrishnan and Smita Jha

13 Grief

Tahneer Oksman

14 Placebo/Nocebo

Ada S. Jaarsma, Suze G. Berkhout, Maya

Morton Ninomiya, and Eva-Marie Stern

15 Therapeutic Performance

Anna Mukamal

16 Virus

Judy Diamond, Bob Hall,

and Aaron Sutherlen

17 Visibility

benjamin lee hicks

Section 3: Process (Ways of Making)

18 Care

benjamin lee hicks

19 Diagnosis

Jennifer Scuro

20 Graphic Ethnography

Juliet McMullin

21 Layers

Marianne R. Petit

22 Picturing

Ellen Grabiner

23 OCD

Ian Williams

Section 4: Personal/Autobiographical

(Ways of Documenting)

24 Drugs

Paul Flippen

vi Contents

25 Emoji

Kara Laurene Pernicano

26 Loss of Control

Liz Argall

27 Performance

Savita Rani

28 Rumination

Micol Muratori

Section 5: Politics (Ways of Doing)

29 Climate Change

Kay Sohini

30 Gynographics

Chinmay Murali

31 Journey/Quest

Andrew Godfrey-Meers

32 Posthumanism

Sathyaraj Venkatesan

33 Scars

Monica Chiu

34 Solving/Solution(s)

Sofia Varino

35 Trauma

Jennifer Scuro

36 Uncanny Pictorial

Embodiment

Mélanie Proulx

37 Windows

Kay Sohini

Index of Related Keywords/

Keyimages

List of Contributors

Graphic Studies