Using Comics to Explore Race and Colonialism in Medical Education (54)
Tracks
Track 2
| Monday, April 20, 2026 |
| 12:15 PM - 1:35 PM |
| 50 Sussex, Main Gallery |
Overview
Dr. Ellen Amster
Details
Learning Objectives: Describe historical challenges in medicine and analyze how comics as a medium can illuminate these issues from a critical historical perspective; Explain how graphic medicine can be used to communicate complex concepts such as structural racism, and identify strategies to apply this approach in teaching or clinical education.
Speaker
Dr. Ellen Amster
Hannah Chair In The History Of Medicine, Associate Professor Dept Of Family Medicine
Mcmaster University
Using Comics to Explore Race and Colonialism in Medical Education
Abstract
Purpose: Graphic medicine is a new tool for medical education, here we discuss “graphic medical history.” This project began after a medical student asked me for a lecture on the history of race and colonialism in medicine. One of 3 black MD students in a school of 613, she and her fellow MD students involved me in their struggle to change their program.
I realized what seemed like fragments—the histories of medicine I research, scandals of racialized patient mistreatment, the dethroning of some “Great Men of Medicine,” students’ clinical experiences, and the rise of neofascism in North America—were interconnected realities. In fact, these are elements of a single story: the past, present and future of race and colonialism in medicine. This book tells that story.
Methods: We use comics to illustrate the interconnectedness of past and present, use visual metaphor, juxtapose documents with narrative, and leap across space and time. The characters are composites of MD students and dialogue is often verbatim from interview transcripts. The visuals and content draw from my lecture, “The Past, Present, and Future of Race and Colonialism in Medicine,” a 2021 constructivist grounded-theory study of 44 MD students, and a CMAJ article with a few concepts; it has 40 health research citations. This comic history is framed by a hat tip to Jules Verne and the fictional fantastic.
Discussion: Today’s MD trainees are racially diverse and 50% female; they do not see themselves in the heroic “Great [White] Men of Medicine.” Recent controversies over figures like “father of gynecology” J. Marion Sims reveal how whitewashed the canon is. A more complete social history of medicine highlights women doctors, non-white physicians, and hidden barriers to becoming a doctor. The findings of the qualitative research study are here addressed through characters in a comic history.
I realized what seemed like fragments—the histories of medicine I research, scandals of racialized patient mistreatment, the dethroning of some “Great Men of Medicine,” students’ clinical experiences, and the rise of neofascism in North America—were interconnected realities. In fact, these are elements of a single story: the past, present and future of race and colonialism in medicine. This book tells that story.
Methods: We use comics to illustrate the interconnectedness of past and present, use visual metaphor, juxtapose documents with narrative, and leap across space and time. The characters are composites of MD students and dialogue is often verbatim from interview transcripts. The visuals and content draw from my lecture, “The Past, Present, and Future of Race and Colonialism in Medicine,” a 2021 constructivist grounded-theory study of 44 MD students, and a CMAJ article with a few concepts; it has 40 health research citations. This comic history is framed by a hat tip to Jules Verne and the fictional fantastic.
Discussion: Today’s MD trainees are racially diverse and 50% female; they do not see themselves in the heroic “Great [White] Men of Medicine.” Recent controversies over figures like “father of gynecology” J. Marion Sims reveal how whitewashed the canon is. A more complete social history of medicine highlights women doctors, non-white physicians, and hidden barriers to becoming a doctor. The findings of the qualitative research study are here addressed through characters in a comic history.
Biography
I'm a historian, health researcher, and now comics enthusiast
COI Disclosure: I do not have an affiliation (financial or otherwise) with any for-profit or not-for-profit organizations
COI Disclosure: I do not have an affiliation (financial or otherwise) with any for-profit or not-for-profit organizations
