When Comics Meet Health: Graphic Medicine

The illness narrative has traditionally been dominated by the perspective of health professionals and researchers, offering an account described using clinical parameters and medical metrics and diagnoses. Essential though it is for scientific progress, this ‘top-down’ approach (Maturo & Moretti, 2024) is often distant from the daily experience of patients and their care- givers. Recent decades have witnessed a shift in this approach, with medi- cine recognising the crucial importance of the patient’s voice in the care pathway, highlighting that it is imperative to integrate individual narratives into clinical practices. This is the origin of Narrative-Based Medicine (NBM), theorised by Charon in 2006, an approach that seeks to bridge this gap by valorising patients’ individual experiences through their narra- tives, with a view to enabling an understanding of health that is human, cultural and multidimensional rather than exclusively biological