Jefferson University medical students are hanging up their stethoscopes and picking up their sketchbooks this summer.
The school’s new graphic medicine course has students creating comic strips to improve their attention to detail and ability to communicate with patients.
“The crux of the course is teaching observation and hoping that through that empathy grows,” Christian Patchell, the course’s instructor, said. “I’ve noticed that when someone’s hands are active and creating, they’re more likely to have a personal conversation with you.”
Patchell saw the different ways art can help bring out compassion in students throughout the course. In one lesson, he allowed students to ask him about his own experiences with tongue cancer, which he documented using werewolves and other monsters to represent his treatments in the graphic novel “I Put the Can in Cancer.”
“At first they asked the questions they were taught to ask,” Patchell said. “They asked about my profile, if I was a smoker.”
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The lesson continued and, as the students worked on their sketches, the questions they asked began to change.
“They asked things like, ‘what could have made your experience better?’ No one had asked me that before,” Patchell said.
Throughout the course students worked on different assignments, including exercises in autobiographical and patient-perspective cartooning. The autobiographical sketches helped Patchell learn more about his students.
“I went in not knowing what inspires a doctor or a nurse to study medicine and they all had these really great stories,” he said.
While many of the student’s assignments are focused on the students and their future patients, others allow them to have a bit more fun. For one assignment, students based their work off of designs by the cartoonist Michael Paulus who draws popular cartoon characters as skeletons.
Patchell also brought Star Wars figurines to class for students to use as cartoon models of the human form.
“You have not lived until you’ve had medical students playing with your Star Wars toys,” he said.
The course, which will be offered again in the fall, is part of a 2017 redesign of Jefferson’s medical curriculum. The new curriculum, known as JeffMD, integrates required courses in the arts and humanities to help doctors develop the empathy they need to better understand what their patients are experiencing. JeffMD is the first major redesign of Jefferson’s medical program in nearly 100 years.
