The Trauma of Medical Training in Two Webcomics: A Call for Multimodal Citation

Abstract

Medical anthropologists have long wrestled with the problematic mind/body opposition that plagues both biomedicine and Euro-American epistemologies. However, medical anthropology as a field has been surprisingly reticent to engage with visual media forms and creative expression, whether film, comics, or animation, even as these media have been shown to augment the bodily and emotional impact on the viewers as compared to solely text-based media. This essay is an attempt to rethink how medical anthropologists can engage more with visual media, taking as an example two comic memoirs created by physicians about their medical training: “Healing Alone” (2019) and “Dailies of a Junior Doc” (2021). These webcomics effectively convey strong emotional and bodily experiences tied to medical education, and are powerful examples of how comics can be leveraged to reexamine assumptions about who can be doctors, how medical training molds them, and what sustains their practice. [medical training, webcomics, visual media, Cartesianism].