In a recent feature, the Philadelphia Inquirer examines the growing publishing genre of graphic medicine, which employs comics in the fields of medical education and patient care. Dana Walrath, a medical anthropologist at the University of Vermont, is one such figure in the graphic medicine field. She published the book Aliceheimer’s, Alzheimer’s Through the Looking Glass, featuring essays and drawings of her mother, Alice, who has the disease. The book is part of Pennsylvania State University’s Graphic Medicine series, which started last year and includes the scholarly book Graphic Medicine Manifesto, a compilation of layered essays and original comic narratives that introduce readers to the field. Graphic medicine, according to Walrath, is “an outsider medium, better equipped than words alone to bring perspective to a tragic, incurable disease.”

Last year, Annals of Internal Medicine, a Philadelphia-based medical journal, also started publishing a graphic medicine series. Editor Darren Taichman, a pulmonologist at the University of Pennsylvania, says that the new initiative has received “overwhelmingly positive” feedback: “It has touched (people). It’s made them think.” The comics address a complex, charged issue from another perspective, and “it’s resonated with their own experience,” Taichman says.