Illustrated Stories of Severe Asthma: a Case Study.

This is a critical account of a project in which Illustration and oral history students developed demonstration graphic medicine artworks in response to interviews with people with severe asthma. The people with severe asthma collaborated with the students to produce the illustrated narratives as comics. The graphic medicine outputs tell the stories of how two lives changed due to new medications. This paper uses the student projects as a case study to explore the novel methodological approach. The comics demonstrate a shift in narrative authority towards the interviewees and the reader, and away from the artists who had no medical expertise or the medical experts who had no lived experience of the disease. Vernacular medical knowledge was used to capture unique perspectives, and students’ active participation in the interviews was of critical significance in providing new insights into the lived experiences of medical intervention. The paper reflects on the visual and narrative techniques employed by the students to communicate these stories, the value of this process for students and the possibility of using this approach within a formal research study.

All expressed significant value from the experience.