Graphic Medicine
Shrink: Story of a Fat Girl
GRAPHIC NOVEL
“Nuanced and vulnerable, this succeeds as both a body-politics primer and a personal story of the rocky path to self-acceptance.”—Publishers Weekly
“Shrink is such an important graphic novel on a very important subject—fat discrimination— which is endemic in healthcare and embedded at a policy level. This moving story highlights (with references!) the physical and psychological cost that may be incurred by attempting to adhere to societal and medical norms. I wish I could give a copy of Rachel Thomas’s book to every healthcare student in the land.”
—Ian Williams, author of The Bad Doctor
Derided by her high-school peers for being overweight, Rachel finally found a sense of purpose and belonging in a promising career as an EMT—that is, until her body got in the way.
Shrink is a work of graphic medicine that depicts the emotional and physical realities of inhabiting a large body in a world that is constantly warning about the medical and social dangers of being “too fat.” This smart and candid book challenges the idea that weight loss is the only path for a fat person and encourages the reader to question the prevailing cultural and medical discourse about fat bodies.
Seamlessly weaving the most current research on the fatness debate with her own experiences of living in a fat body, Thomas lays bare society’s obsession with size and advocates for each of us to push back on body weight bias and determine what’s right for our own health and well-being, both physical and mental.
FOG: WAR AND ALZHEIMER'S
GRAPHIC NOVEL: COMING SOON!
Fog is a mixed media graphic novel that chronicles the life of a WW2 RCAF fighter pilot, G.A. "Murray" Thomas as he negotiates the stark realities of war with his advancing memory loss due to Alzheimer’s.
A work of graphic medicine, Fog contextualises personal and historical experiences from the perspective of a brain that is slowly deteriorating due to Alzheimer’s. In many cases of this disease, there is a distortion when it comes to timelines, i.e whether time is passing in a normal and linear way. Short term memory is typically affected, whereas long term is clearer. This causes those with Alzheimer’s to live in their past when their cognitive functioning begins to decline.[1]
Fog is written and illustrated as to show this decline as it would have happened to Murray: the memories from the past are illustrated in detail and with soft gradients while his present self exists in a simple black and white world. Memories towards the end of the book are more mixed and convoluted, showing a crossing of timelines and descent into the fog of his memory.
This book is a collaborative project between three generations: the pilot himself (G.A “Murray” Thomas (1923-1998), his son (Steven M. Thomas), and his granddaughter (Dr. Rachel M. Thomas). It is based on oral histories in addition to archival and medical research, underscoring a unique approach to the subject matter: intergenerational authorship.
[1] Rosenbaum, R Shayna et al. “"Where to?" remote memory for spatial relations and landmark identity in former taxi drivers with Alzheimer's disease and encephalitis.” Journal of cognitive neuroscience vol. 17,3 (2005): 446-62. doi:10.1162/0898929053279496
SHORT FORM COMIC
CONTENT WARNING: Depictions of menstruation/menstrual blood
A four page full colour pantomime comic regarding the dismissal of women's health concerns in clinical settings.
Critically understudied, women’s health concerns from chronic pain to reproductive disorders continue to be overlooked by doctors and other practitioners in healthcare settings.
Biases towards women are pervasive and lead to consistent under/misdiagnosis for a variety of health concerns. Pain is dismissed as a symptom of mental illness, a leftover from the era of ‘hysteria’ and in contrast to the ‘stoic’ male body. Fat women are told to lose weight regardless of the nature of the visit, leading to an outright refusal to seek future medical advice. Reproductive health problems such as polycystic ovarian syndrome and endometriosis are not well understood by healthcare professionals. It can therefore take between 2 and 7 years to officially diagnose, if symptoms are taken seriously in the first instance.
Systemic issues around the treatment of female bodies continues to exist in Western healthcare settings today. Better education on addressing biases for healthcare professionals is imperative for better health outcomes in the future.
A short-term solution, however, is simple: just listen.
JUST LISTEN
EXERCISE TO IMPROVE BALANCE AND FALLS IN PEOPLE WITH COPD: A SYSTEMATIC REVIEW AND META-ANALYSIS
ILLUSTRATED QUALITATIVE STUDY RESULTS
A sample of illustrations from a forthcoming publication (collaboration with Teesside researchers from the School of Health): Harrison, S., Suri, S., Loughran, K., Thomas, R. (2024) “Exercise Based Interventions Targeting Balance and Falls in People with COPD: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis”. This comic analyzes and reinterpret difficult concepts into visual terms to provide accessibility of content to a variety of health literacies.
