What insights can comics provide into advance care planning, dying, death, and caregiving? Can comics help us better understand our own wishes about end of life? Can comics help us more clearly discuss end of life with our patients?
Death Panels: Exploring Dying and Death Through Comics is an interactive seminar designed to introduce medical students to the field of graphic medicine and explore how comics can be used as a mode of reflection, education, advocacy, and research into issues related to dying, death, caregiving, and the end of life.
Through didactics, discussion, and drawing, this course provides students with a unique interdisciplinary and creative opportunity to explore dying and death.
This course will balance readings and discussion with creative drawing and comics-making assignments. This work is intended to provoke personal inquiry, self-reflection, and understanding about a range of topics relating to the end of life. The readings will primarily be drawn from a wide variety of graphic memoirs and comics, but will be supplemented with materials from a variety of multimedia sources including the biomedical literature, philosophy, cinema, podcasts, and the visual arts. No prior knowledge or experience of graphic novels, comics, drawing, medicine, and/or death are required.
The seminar will be taught by MK Czerwiec (Sir-wick), a nurse-cartoonist who is a co-founder of the field of graphic medicine and scholar of the health humanities.
Week 1: Tuesday, November 28, 1pm CT, McGaw Room 2-403
Why drawing? Why comics? Why death?
Read for class on Tuesday: Introduction to the Graphic Medicine Manifesto, PDF here.
“Empathy 101” by Josh Neufeld
“Let’s Talk About Death” by Caitlin Sellers
Class followup – a few things we shared and discussed, should you choose to revisit
More on drawing conics: here is a book excerpt with some tips on making comic characters. If you want more information on making comics, I have a ton of resources here.
Week 2: Tuesday, December 5, 1pm CT
NOTE NEW ROOM! McGaw Pavilion, 240 E. Huron St., Active Learning Classroom – Room A
Talk About It: Advance Directives and Their Limitations
For class Tuesday, be sure to:
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- Read the comic I distributed, Health & Wealth
- Draw a “before” and “after” panel to the clinical encounter comic you made in class
- refresh your recollection of what the term “advance directives” refers to (see below)
- Read this comic about advance directives
- Bring your drawing supplies to class.
Additional reading – not required but great for discussion, from a book-in-progress on this topic, “Chapter 6: Code”
And this interview with Susan Shapiro, author of Speaking for the Dying
Following up from class, your homework assignment for our next meeting will be to:
- Do a book report and review of the book you chose in class (or was chosen for you.) You don’t need to write a paper, but rather you will be presenting this report & review to the class. You can share images from the book via the overhead projector, you can even draw a panel or sequence of panels in response to the book. But be prepared to give a 5-7 minute presentation of your book to the class.
2. After our discussion of the importance of knowing the care wishes of our loved ones, consider having a conversation about end of life with another person important to you. Here are a few tips to help get you started. Bonus: make a comic about the conversation!
(click in images from class below to enlarge)
AND HEY – In The New York Times the day after we met. This is our blind contour exercise drawing one another by Wendy MacNaughton.
Week 3: January 9, 2024 on Zoom – use this link.
Being With Dying – book reports
Follow up (optional):
Read “French Resistance” from With the End in Mind by Kathryn Mannix (4 pages) (This is the text the video above is based upon.)
“What Is It Like To Be Dying?” (11 minute video) The New Yorker, 2021
Week 4: January 16, 2024 McGaw – Classroom C
Caring for Those Who Care – PLEASE BRING THE BOOKS YOU REPORTED ON TO CLASS.
Read the following comics:
“You Think You Want to Die at Home? Think Again” by Nathan Gray
Excerpt from Special Exits by Joyce Farmer (one of the books reviewed last week)
Make Good Art by Zen Pencils, based on a commencement address by Neil Gaiman
Come to class prepared to draw! And don’t forget to bring that book you reviewed back to class.
Class follow-up:
- New report issued: Working While Caring: Innovations and Interventions to Support Caregivers in the Workplace from the Rosalynn Carter Institute for Caregivers.
- Check out this AWESOME somewhat related new online comic, “When Accidents Happen: True Stories from an ICU Nurse”
- And since we broached the topic of humor, and when it is/isn’t appropriate in medicine, please listen to this excellent lecture on the topic by FSM faculty Katie Watson. If you’d rather read an article on the same topic, here it is.
- And here is a nice collection of Grim Reaper cartoons.
Week 5: January 23, 2024 McGaw Classroom C
The Good Death & The Good Life
Preparation for class:
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- Performing the Good Death: The Medieval Ars Moriendi and Contemporary Doctors, Thornton & Phillips
- Historical and Cultural Variants on the Good Death, Walter
- Toward a New Ethical Framework for the Art of Dying Well, Dugdale
- The Good Death , Czerwiec
