Graphic medicine novel: 20,000 Leagues Under the Hospital
Graphic medicine novel: 20,000 Leagues Under the Hospital
Professor Amster is currently preparing a graphic medicine work with support from Associated Medical Services. AMS is donor to the Hannah Chair in the History of Medicine, which Dr. Amster holds at McMaster.
What is the research about?
This graphic novel will illuminate the new awareness of the inconvenient pasts of modern medicine, from its treatment of enslaved and colonized populations to why we are now dethroning medical heroes like J. Marion Sims.
In this work, Dr. Amster will explore how race and colonialism became integral in medicine, how they continue invisibly in the structures of medicine, and how patients and doctors are now confronting this past. Through a somewhat fantastical adventure “20,000 leagues beneath the hospital,” medical students confront the past to understand the present and change the future.
What did the researcher do?
Dr. Amster uses comics for religious studies teaching and health humanities work. Comics allow the exploration of complex ideas in an accessible and visually stimulating form, one that personifies abstract concepts.
For this work, Dr. Amster draws upon medical history research and ethnographic insights from a large interview project she created with medical student collaborators to describe the medical student training experience. She is working with a cartoonist studio to translate medical history to imagery and action.
Dr. Amster teaches medical humanities and history for the medical school at McMaster and has developed a research portal accessible to all.
Researcher
Ellen Amster
PhD
Associate Professor, Religious Studies
Associate Professor, Family Medicine, Faculty of Health Sciences
Adjunct & Associate Member, Anthropology
Jason A. Hannah Chair in the History of Medicine
Member, McMaster Institute for Research on Aging (MIRA), McMaster University
Associate Member, Health Research Methods, Evidence, and Impact, Faculty of Health Sciences