Beyond nescience: the intersectional insights of health humanities

Through a comparison of two graphic novels concerned with the experience of cancer diagnosis and treatment, Brian Fies's Mom's Cancer (2006) and Harvey Pekar and Joyce Brabner's Our Cancer Year (1994), this essay suggests some of the strengths and limitations of the medical humanities in responding to the experience of illness. It demonstrates how the graphic medium enables us to generate a new set of reading strategies and thus to articulate a more complex and powerful analysis of illness, disability, medicine, and health. Finally, the essay considers the question raised by the comparison of the graphic novels: whether the term "health humanities" might not be preferable to its predecessor, "medical humanities."