A Medical Graphic Narrative

I've been working with a professor of medical ethics at Penn State who teaches a class to third year med students about graphic storytelling in medicine. He basically has his med students draw a comic. Why? I asked the same question. It turns out that he (and a handful of other people around the world) are onto something interesting. In a daunting world of illness, medical science and the all-to-frequent gulf in understanding between patient and physician, comics can help. They can powerfully allow the creator and the reader to grapple with emotional issues in an immediate and easily accessible way. Whether it's physicians taking the rare opportunity to explore their own emotions surrounding the pressures of their vocation or patients coming to terms with illness and relating to those who seek to help them, sequential art, or medical graphic storytelling, can aid in that process. Below is a sequence I drew that illustrates an incident that occurred during a young physician's residency and which still haunts him to this day. (Click on the individual pages to enlarge.)