Abstract
ABSTRACT An empathetic patient-practitioner relationship has been shown to improve treatment and recovery among patients, and decrease the likelihood of malpractice suits among medical professionals. It is, therefore, puzzling why an empathetic approach to medical education through medical humanities has not been more widely adopted. The interdisciplinary field of medical humanities includes topics such as graphic narrative. Operating from a discourse analytic perspective, this paper presents a dissection of the place of graphic narrative in medical education grounded in the visual semiotic theories of Kress and Van Leeuwen (2001) and Jewitt and Oyama (2001). Graphic medicine is a form of graphic narrative that gives those suffering with, treating, or caring for loved ones with an illness, a form of expression that isn’t available through verbal communication. Through semiotic analysis of representational, interpersonal, and compositional metafunctions of four graphic narratives composed by medical students at Penn State College of Medicine, this paper explores the significance of empathy in the doctor–patient interaction, revealing that an empathetic approach to medicine is valuable to patients and their families, as well as to doctors and medical students, and should be further implemented beginning in medical school.
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