Humanizing Medicine Through Graphic Storytelling: A Rhetorical Analysis of Student-Created Graphic Narrative This oral presentation focuses on a rhetorical analysis of the comics produced in Dr. Green's course, "Graphic Storytelling and Medical Narratives," particularly those students' comics that represent communicative interactions between themselves and the physicians they work with and learn from in clinical settings. After a brief literature review covering the comic medium's adaptability to various rhetorical situations within medical discourse, we will present the results of a content analysis of 19 student-created comics. This analysis provides statistical evidence for communicative trends between senior medical students and their supervising physicians. We will close our discussion with several exemplar texts that elaborate on medical student agency during this initial period of clinical training. Brandon Strubberg and Tim Elliott are second-year PhD students in Technical Communication and Rhetoric at Texas Tech University. Brandon's Master's thesis focused on rhetorical representations of diabetic identity, and he has presented on the topic in the past. His current research projects include examining the interactions between identities of disease and technology as well as the usability of medical manuals. Tim has presented a number of papers on superhero comics and popular culture, mostly recently on a panel titled "Giant Sized Introductions: Using X-Men Relaunches as a Vehicle for Introducing Students to the Superhero Comic," presented at the Rocky Mountain Conference on Graphic Novels. He remains interested in the possibilities for comic books as a medium for conveying complex information to mass audiences.
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