REAL HEROES: PANDEMICS AND GRAPHIC MEDICINE | Katie Grogan and Kriota Willberg

‘Graphic Medicine: Pandemics, History, and Comics,’ a six-week online course at one United States medical school, uses pathographic narratives and their history to contextualize cultural and personal responses to the global COVID-19 pandemic. Students explore how representations of disease, contagion and quarantine have shaped and been shaped by such factors as healthcare access, racism, political ideology, nationalism and vaccine ethics over time. Using historical pandemic imagery as a point of reference, students make their own graphic medicine narratives, expressing their individual reactions and responses to COVID-19. Student artists include Pablo Castaneda, Victoria Chen, Loren Collado, Laura Crandall, Emily Duan, Carole Filangieri, Trish Ippolito, Olivia Jeb, Carmen Perez, Danielle Rigau, Michael Shen and Emily Yin.

*Privilege by Carmen Perez and The Anatomy of Your Room During Covid by Danielle Rigau*

*Work by Danielle Rigau, Covid 19: My Goldilocks Story by Olivia Jebb and Victoria Chen*

*Times of Covid by Pablo Castenada and Wheel of Covid Fortune by Laura Gould*

Katie Grogan, DMH, MA was Assistant Director of the Master Scholars Program in Humanistic Medicine and Clinical Instructor of Medical Humanities at NYU Grossman School of Medicine from 2012 to 2022. She is now Senior Education Manager for the Center to Advance Palliative Care within the Mount Sinai Health System, where she develops interdisciplinary training for clinicians caring for people living with serious illness.

Kriota Willberg, MFA is a cartoonist, interdisciplinary artist, massage therapist and health science educator. She is Artist in Residence at NYU Grossman School of Medicine. Willberg is the author of Draw Stronger: Self-Care for Cartoonists and Visual Artists, and her comic Silver Wire was nominated for a 2019 Ignatz Award.

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