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.
Class 1: Introduction to Graphic Medicine
January 23, 2024, 3-5pm, McGaw Classroom C
Read for class on Tuesday:
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Introduction to the Graphic Medicine Manifesto, PDF here.
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“Empathy 101” by Josh Neufeld
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“Let’s Talk About Death” by Caitlin Sellers
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Class followup:
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.
Class 2: Advance Directives & Their Limitations
Tuesday, January 30, 3 pm, McGaw Classroom C
For class Tuesday, be sure to:
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Draw a “before” and “after” panel to the clinical encounter comic you made in class
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refresh your recollection of what the term “advance directives” refers to (see below)
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Read this comic about advance directives
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Read this comic, Health & Wealth
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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”)
- True Stories from the ICU: Was it right to keep her alive?
- LATE ADD: Never the Right Time guide for advance care discussions
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Class 3: Being With Dying
February 6, 2024
This class will be via Zoom. Use this link.
Optional class prep, aside from your book reports:
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: Caring for Caregivers
February 20, 2024
This class will be via Zoom. Use this link.
Please do the following before class Tuesday:
- read “You Think You Want to Die at Home? Think Again” by Nathan Gray
- read this excerpt from Special Exits by Joyce Farmer
- check out this AWESOME somewhat related new online comic, “When Accidents Happen: True Stories from an ICU Nurse”
- on the topic of humor for coping, 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. (This is optional but encouraged.)
Week 5: 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
- Your “Self Care Toolbox” assigned last class
