Conference Program

Graphic medicine (GM) has emerged as an interdisciplinary field integrating comics, visual storytelling, and healthcare, offering innovative tools for medical education and reflective practice. Despite growing interest, there is still limited qualitative research examining how GM is experienced by medical students across different cultural and institutional contexts. This study explores and compares students’ experiences with graphic medicine at the University of Bologna (Italy) and at the Universidad de Valparaíso (Chile).

A qualitative research design based on semi-structured interviews was adopted. Participants included medical students (10) from different years of training who had taken part in graphic medicine and narrative medicine courses, laboratories, or extracurricular projects in the two universities. Interviews were conducted in Spanish and Italian, audio-recorded, transcribed verbatim, and analyzed using thematic analysis. Analytical focus was placed on participants’ prior relationships with drawing and visual arts, their experiences of graphic medicine as a learning environment and the role of drawing and comics in emotional expression and reflection.

Across both contexts, GM was described as a distinct educational space characterized by openness, safety, and collective reflection, in contrast to traditional biomedical training. Participants reported increased awareness of the ethical and communicative dimensions of clinical practice, particularly regarding the weight of medical language, gestures, and attitudes. Participants also highlighted structural and institutional challenges, including the elective status of GM courses and the difficulty of integrating reflective, non-assessed practices within highly standardized and performance-oriented medical curricula. In this sense, GM operated as a redistributive epistemic practice, giving voice to students' situated knowledge and enabling counter-narratives to the techno-scientific authority that structures medical training

The comparative findings from Chile and Italy indicate that integrating GM into medical curricula may help bridge the gap between technical-scientific training and the humanistic dimensions of care, promoting more empathetic, reflective, and socially aware future physicians.