Spring, Ken Montini

Medical Student Comics 3/3

Do you have to want to be a cartoonist in order to make comics?

Or can making comics be more like singing along to a song when we are alone for no reason other than it gives us something (almost undetectable) that not singing doesn’t?

Or can making comics be more like using a salt and pepper shaker to show your friend just where your car was in relation to the other car when the accident happened?

What if people thought of making comics as another good way to sort certain things out?

The comic strip above is from a collection of comics done by 4th year medical students at Penn State.  More about the project below:

GRAPHIC STORY TELLING & MEDICAL NARRATIVES : A COLLECTION OF GRAPHIC STORIES BY FOURTH-YEAR MEDICAL STUDENTS AT PENN STATE COLLEGE OF MEDICINE

In February, 2009 and again in 2010 and 2011, fourth year medical students at Penn State College of Medicine enrolled in an elective course in Medical Humanities called “Graphic Storytelling and Medical Narratives.”

The course was developed to show fourth-year medical students “how graphics and text can be used to effectively communicate complex medical narratives, and [to] develop their own stories into graphic depictions.”

Taught seminar-style, the course requirements were minimal: participate in all classroom activities, be good colleagues to one another, and produce a short, original, illustrated story, or “Comic.”

Of course not all medical students are naturally gifted writers or artists, but as one can see from the following pages, everyone can tell stories and everyone can draw pictures.

While this course was unlike any other in their medical school experience, the students rose to the task, sharing their refl ections on becoming a doctor with honesty, wit, and creativity.

Enjoy the following graphic storytelling and medical narratives by the medical students of Penn State College of Medicine

Also visit the Penn State Alumni Update website to read an article titled:
Beyond Superheroes: Comics as a New Genre for Medical Storytelling

Michael Green, MD, MS, FACP
Course Director, Professor of Humanities and Medicine

(comic by Kie Lee)

See more from this series of comics here..