COVID Comics: What Can Graphic Medicine Teach Us About the Pandemic?
Graphic Medicine is a relatively recent medical humanities field that sits at the intersection of the medium of comics and the discourse of medicine and healthcare. It includes visual pathographies—graphic narratives documenting patients’ and caregivers’ experiences of disease, autobiographies, zines, pamphlets and other forms of comics that approach the questions of health and illness from various angles.
The COVID-19 pandemic and the amount of morbidity, loss of life and significant changes to ordinary life it engendered allowed for numerous narratives to emerge, including graphic narratives that address varying topics from the cathartic processing of the trauma caused by the loss of a loved one, to communicating information about hygiene and vaccines to a wide audience, to addressing issues such as the inequities exacerbated or accentuated by the pandemic. This lecture explored some of Graphic Medicine’s contributions to the ways in which we made sense of and communicated about the COVID-19 pandemic.
About the Historian of Medicine
Soha Bayoumi is a Senior Lecturer in the Medicine, Science, and the Humanities Program at Johns Hopkins University. Trained in political theory, political philosophy and intellectual history, she works on the question of justice at the intersection of history, political theory, and science, technology and medicine studies. With a focus on medicine and public health, her research addresses the questions of health and social justice, biomedical ethics, and the medicine-politics nexus, with a geographical focus on the Middle East and a special interest in postcolonial and gender studies. Her research interests focus on medical expertise and how it is deployed in different political contexts.
