Diabetes Year One. Drawing my Pathography: Comics, Poetry and the Medical Self

Abstract

In this article I reflect on the creation of my graphic pathography Diabetes: Year One (2018). I discuss and evaluate the ways in which, trying to articulate a patient perspective that is both personal and universal, my work moved into comics, and how the process involved the discovery of an aesthetic, that required the negotiation of the elements of comics, including: the visual interpretation and development of my ‘self’ and avatar, and the construction of a narrative viewpoint; the understanding and use of a spatial ‘rhythm and metre’ within the panel sequence; the layering of the page through colour and medium; the ‘designing’ of the narrative, and the interrelation of words and image. I then consider my project in the context of the field of graphic medicine (Squier & Williams, 2015) and the work of Nick Sousanis (Sousanis, 2015); from the position of imaging and articulating a complex, or immersive account of patient experience and argue that this approach can provide a nuanced account of medical identity that can enable a richer understanding of patient experience, which, in turn, can be a valuable contribution to the imaging and design of the patient-practitioner interface.