Using Comics to Communicate About Health: An Introduction to the Symposium on Visual Narratives and Graphic Medicine

摘要

Health communication practitioners and researchers benefit from investigating novel methods for conveying information to a variety of relevant audiences (i.e., the public, health care professionals). Research has demonstrated the utility of using narratives to communicate about health (see, e.g., Green, 2006; Hinyard & Kreuter, 2007) and that using visual messaging elements (i.e., photos, illustrations, graphical displays) can be beneficial in communicating complex information (see, e.g., Houts, Doak, Doak, & Loscalzo, 2006). Allied fields, like medical education and public health, have started to pursue more systematic investigation of the intersection of narratives and visualization to communicate about health. The term "graphic medicine" (see Czerwiec et al., 2015; Green, 2010; Williams, 2012) has been coined by a collective of interested researchers, clinicians, and artists to capture this new subfield of research and practice.