Jennifer Marie J. Yang, MD

A lot of the published fiction and nonfiction prose in the medical humanities deals with physicians. Think Atul Gawande’s books and Robin Cook’s novels (Elaine and I did a term paper for that in our college Humanities 103 class looong ago). Same thing with TV shows – the likes of Dr. Kildare, Doogie Howser, M.D. and House, M.D. outnumber Nurse Jackie.

Yet anyone in healthcare knows that patient care is a team approach. I learned in Medical Humanities class (taught by Dr. Christine Phillips here at the Australian National University) that there are relatively few pieces of literature and media (TV, movies, etc.) that have nurses as protagonists. The WHO reports that 50% of healthcare workers are nurses and midwives – which means as healthcare personnel, physicians are overrepresented in all forms of media and literature.

So it’s exciting to see that Marvel teamed up with the Allegheny Hospital Network in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA for a series of comic books featuring nursing staff. This celebrates their stories and contributions to healthcare in a very accessible way – comics (OK, graphic novels) can reach more people since they don’t require a long attention span, and the illustrations appeal to people who are visual learners (or just generally like pictures instead of blocks of text).

Read more here: https://edition.cnn.com/2020/12/04/us/marvel-ahn-team-up-to-celebrate-nurses-trnd/index.html

Social Media