Visuals play an important role in the history and practice of medicine, from medical textbooks to medical imaging, and from hospital signage and public health posters to comics and graphic novels. This course will examine the use of visuals in medicine, but will place particular emphasis on a new academic and creative field known as “graphic medicine”—medical comics and graphic novels. Over the course of the semester, we will ask questions about how attending to the visual allows us to think in new ways about diagnostic practices, therapeutics, medical consumerism, doctor-patient communication, and ways in which patients and caregivers narrate their personal experiences of disease. We will pay careful attention to questions of class, race and gender, and to larger ethical and political issues raised by our materials.