Teaching doctors-in-training to make comics is about getting them to employ tools—of attention, empathy, perspective, and storytelling—that will serve them well in their medical careers. Above, two drawings of Mickey Mouse by Melissa Chiang, a medical student in Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons’s class of 2019. Twelve of the country’s brightest medical students are trying to remember whether Mickey Mouse wears pants. They’ve been asked to draw the popular cartoon character from memory, and, while gathered in a state-of-the-art medical classroom in Washington Heights, they approach this task with the same focus and intensity that they used earlier in the week to memorize the complex chain of chemical reactions known as the clotting cascade. That was for their unit in hematology. Mickey’s pants are for a newer entry to the curriculum: “Comics and Visual Storytelling.” The concept of doctor as storyteller is not a new one, nor is the idea that it’s a critical component of a doctor’s identity. What’s changed in recent years is the idea that storytelling is a skill that can be taught directly in the classroom—that it’s not some vague life skill that can only be learned through experience (or, worse, the type of ability one either does or doesn’t have). Credit for this development goes in large part to Dr. Rita Charon, an internist at Columbia University Medical Center. In the early two-thousands, she formalized a program in narrative medicine, with a stated mission to train health-care workers “to recognize, absorb, metabolize, interpret, and be moved by the stories of illness.” Implicit in the narrative approach is the idea of self-reflection, of which there is often precious little in medicine. High patient volumes and honest-to-goodness life-or-death emergencies leave scant time for meditation. Building classes like the comics workshop into the medical-school curriculum allows for a kind of early intervention, making students aware of the narrative challenges they face before they’re sent out to the wards and clinics full time and given the opportunity to develop bad habits. The class I teach is not actually about comics and drawing per se but about getting students to make use of tools that will serve them well in their medical careers. Tools like attention, for example—which is where Mickey Mouse comes in. Prior to this exercise, these students were confident that they could conjure up a clear mental picture of the Mouse. It’s only when they’re asked to reproduce the mental picture on paper that they realized the number of details they never truly committed to memory. (Spoiler: Mickey wears shorts.) The other core concepts that we approach through art include perspective and empathy. What begins as a lesson on vanishing points, horizon lines, and representing three-dimensional objects on a two-dimensional picture plane evolves into an exploration of how our literal point of view informs our emotional position. Consider an encounter between doctor and patient, at the hospital, by the patient’s bedside. From the patient’s perspective, how might the scene feel while looking up at a doctor standing over the bed versus being eye to eye with a doctor who’s pulled up a chair? For their final assignment in my class, I ask the students to create two-page narrative comics that reflect on an experience they’ve had in their medical training. Here are a few of the comics they produced: Source
