Ethics Grand Rounds: “Graphic Narratives, Comics, and Illustration in Medicine and Medical Ethics”

Speaker: Sherine Hamdy, PhD, University of California, Irvine

Dr. Hamdy is a Professor of Anthropology at the University of California Irvine, where she joined the faculty in 2017. Prior to that she was a tenured faculty member at Brown University where she taught since 2006. She is the author of Our Bodies Belong to God (University of California 2012), co-author of Lissa: a story of friendship, medical promise, and revolution (University of Toronto Press 2017) and co-creator of Landing a Place (Penguin Random house 2026). She teaches courses on medical anthropology and is currently working on a project about women comics creators in the Arab world and its diaspora.

Talk Description: Medical journals and curricula have embraced the emerging field of graphic medicine — narrative medicine that juxtaposes images and text. Patients of chronic illness, caretakers, and health care practitioners have all created valuable accounts in this medium about their struggles to maintain their humanity in the often de-humanizing world of clinical encounters. In this talk, Dr. Hamdy takes us through myriad examples to illustrate the rich capacities of graphic narratives to question day-to-day medical practices and experiences of chronic illness to give us new perspectives on disability, patienthood, caretaking and healing.