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ABSTRACT
An empathetic patient-practitioner relationship has been shown to improve treatment and recovery among patients, and decrease the likelihood of malpractice suits among medical professionals. It is, therefore, puzzling why an empathetic approach to medical education through medical humanities has not been more widely adopted.
The interdisciplinary field of medical humanities includes topics such as graphic narrative. Operating from a discourse analytic perspective, this paper presents a dissection of the place of graphic narrative in medical education grounded in the visual semiotic theories of Kress and Van Leeuwen (2001) and Jewitt and Oyama (2001).
Graphic medicine is a form of graphic narrative that gives those suffering with, treating, or caring for loved ones with an illness, a form of expression that isn’t available through verbal communication. Through semiotic analysis of representational, interpersonal, and compositional metafunctions of four graphic narratives composed by medical students at Penn State College of Medicine, this paper explores the significance of empathy in the doctor–patient interaction, revealing that an empathetic approach to medicine is valuable to patients and their families, as well as to doctors and medical students, and should be further implemented beginning in medical school.
Acknowledgements
A special thanks to Dr Judith Kaplan-Weinger of Northeastern Illinois University for sharing her enthusiasm for graphic narratives and discourse analysis with me. A big thank you to my linguistics professors, Dr Gebhardt, Dr Mahootian and Dr Hallett at Northeastern Illinois University. A thank you to Dr Gail Shuck from Boise State for thoughtful feedback and recommended readings, to Dr Mythili Menon from Wichita State University for connecting me to a like-minded researcher and encouraging me to publish, and to Dr. Maria Ciriza Lope from Texas Christian University for thoughtful feedback and encouragement to publish. Additional thanks to Dr. Green from Penn State College of Medicine for allowing the use of these works, and to the NEIU Foundation for funding to present this research at the Western Conference on Linguistics at Boise State University in 2017.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. These graphic narratives, along with others, can be found at https://sites.psu.edu/graphicnarratives/.
2. Frames will not appear in chronological order, nor do the narratives appear in their entirety due to space. The captions of each panel are written by the author of this paper, not by the authors of the narratives.