I’m very excited to announce that the Spring issue of Atrium, the report Northwestern’s Department of Medical Humanities and Bioethics, is now available!
You can download it as a PDF here or write to the department and a print copy can be sent to you.
The issue is, appropriately, quite visually pleasing. The cover photo, “Dissection of it All” is by Dana Eastman. The issue features a wonderful full-color, four-page comic by former Chicago houseguest Ian Williams called, “Graphic Language.”
The issue also contains an interview I did with manga artist and art therapist Rinko Endo. It contains a stunning article by Lucy Lyons about a disease you may have never heard of called Fibrodysplasia Ossificans Progressiva (FOP) in which connective tissue slowly turns into bone. Another article looks at how the syndicated comic strip “For Better or For Worse” can inform patient care. Another article from the Mayo Clinic Center for Innovation shows how the HIPAA document might work as a comic strip. Another discusses and shows how comic strips might help women in Nigeria be more willing to be diagnosed with and treated for breast cancer. In one last article I’ll mention, artists struggle to represent an autistic perspective visually.
This is the work of Graphic Medicine, the work of comics in the medical context. And what we feature in this issue is just a small part of what is happening in the Graphic Medicine movement, and it is very, very exciting.
I was given the honor of guest editing this issue with Catherine Belling. Curating this issue has been, to use the clichè, a labor of love. Our theme, Graphic, arose from but was not limited to presentations from the Comics & Medicine conference hosted by the department in June of last year.
In July, the University of Toronto medical school will host the 2012 Comics & Medicine conference. At this conference, many more people working at the crossroads of comics and medicine will tell us about their work. Registration information will be forthcoming this week, and the Graphic Medicine Blog will have all the details.