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Background: Patients scheduled for coronary angiography may feel insufficiently informed about the planned procedure. We aimed to evaluate the patient-rated quality of the Informed Consent (IC) process and to investigate the efficacy of medical graphics to assist and improve the IC procedure., Methods: A graphic-based information broschure illustrating central steps of the procedure was created in collaboration with scientific illustrators. In a randomized, controlled, prospective trial, 121 patients undergoing coronary angiography/PCI were randomized to a group obtaining the usual IC (Control group) or to a group that additionally obtained a graphic-based IC (Comic group). The perceived quality of the IC was compared between groups using single items of the Client Satisfaction Questionnaire-8 and self-designed single items., Results: Only 67.8% of patients stated to have completely read the standard written IC sheet. The quality of the IC was perceived to be very good in 45.0% of patients in the Comic group compared to 24.6% in the Control group ( p =.023 ). 57.4% of the Control group compared to 76.7% of the Comic group stated that all of their questions were satisfactorily adressed ( p =.015). 43.3% of the Comic group, in contrast to only 18.0% of the Control group, declared to feel "very satisfied" with the obtained IC procedure ( p =.002 ). The acceptance of this new IC approach was very high: no patient expressed feelings of not being taken seriously when reading medical graphics., Conclusions: Our data confirm pronounced limitations of the usual IC practice. The use of medical graphics positively impacts on patient-evaluated endpoints and may significantly improve the IC procedure., Competing Interests: The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper., (© 2022 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.)

Parasites!, a 2010 comic sponsored by the Wellcome Trust Centre for Molecular Parasitology, demonstrates that a graphic narrative can play a role in energizing public debate. Part of the genre known as graphic medicine-comics about illness, treatment, disability, and caregiving-Parasites! is intended to educate readers of all ages about illnesses less known in the developed world. Two visual strategies in particular enable the comic to offer an alternative and aesthetic response to questions about developing drugs to treat tropical diseases for profit. By including visuals and text, and not just one of these formats, viewers must reorient themselves aesthetically and epistemologically to ethical, social, cultural, and political structures that adversely affect human health., (© 2018 American Medical Association. All Rights Reserved.)

This essay draws on two emerging fields--the study of comics or graphic fiction, and disability studies--to demonstrate how graphic fictions articulate the embodied, ethical, and sociopolitical experiences of impairment and disability. Examining David B's Epileptic and Paul Karasik and Judy Karasik's The Ride Together, I argue that these graphic novels unsettle conventional notions of normalcy and disability. In so doing, they also challenge our assumed dimensions and possibilities of the comics genre and medium, demonstrating the great potential comics hold for disability studies.

Through a comparison of two graphic novels concerned with the experience of cancer diagnosis and treatment, Brian Fies's Mom's Cancer (2006) and Harvey Pekar and Joyce Brabner's Our Cancer Year (1994), this essay suggests some of the strengths and limitations of the medical humanities in responding to the experience of illness. It demonstrates how the graphic medium enables us to generate a new set of reading strategies and thus to articulate a more complex and powerful analysis of illness, disability, medicine, and health. Finally, the essay considers the question raised by the comparison of the graphic novels: whether the term "health humanities" might not be preferable to its predecessor, "medical humanities."

In this essay, the directors of an NEH Institute on "Medicine, Literature, and Culture" consider the lessons they learned by bringing humanities scholars to a teaching hospital for a month-long institute that mingled seminar discussions, outside speakers and clinical observations. In an exchange of letters, they discuss the productive tensions inherent in approaching medicine from multiple perspectives, and they argue the case for a broader conception of medical humanities that incorporates the methodologies of cultural studies.

The article compares three memoirs of genetically based disability: Lisa Roney's sweet, invisible body, Georgina Kleege's Sight Unseen, and Alice Wexler's Mapping Fate. The essay explores the tension between the narrow and the broad construction of disability, as demonstrated by the 1999 Supreme Court rulings on the ADA and as experienced by these three memoirists. It concludes that the approach of narrative bioethics, as exemplified by such a study of disability and illness narratives, can offer the medical and public policy community a valuable alternative perspective on genetic disability not as an incapacity, but as a set of social relations and practices.