Dispatches from Graphic Medicine Europe
Dispatches from Graphic Medicine Europe: Amsterdam & Rotterdam 2026
guest post by Kimberly Myers & Olesya Vynnyk
Kimberly Myers: Our Graphic Medicine community is the professional space where I feel most at home. An academic, creative, whole-person-health-centered synergy quickens those of us who gather around this transdisciplinary work, project after project, year after year. We are an archly productive lot! While our professional achievements are indeed impressive, it is, however, the democratic spirit that I find most rewarding of all. As Ian Williams reminded us in his keynote for the inaugural Graphic Medicine Europe conference in the Netherlands, the heart of the Graphic Medicine community is a commitment to kindness. As he spoke, he projected the image of an artifact verifying the provenance of this ethos: a scribble of the word “kindness” on a note pad from our initial meetings in the early 2010s, when we were just deciding who we wanted to be—the “manifesto” we later laid out in our 2015 Graphic Medicine Manifesto.
Kindness is what inspires us to welcome new voices, new talents and perspectives, new human beings into our collaborative work. The feel of our conferences is curious, inclusive, and supportive. There’s vivacious as well as quieter energy. (Ebru Ustundag’s unbridled laughter and Ian Williams’ sotto voce, respectively, come to mind!). Perhaps particularly important for people who carry out much of their work in solitude, even the most introverted feel no pressure to perform “conference energy” that can be so exhausting.
The highlights from GM conferences are always, for me, the quiet moments when two people connect over coffee between sessions or enjoy a drink after hours.
I loved hearing how Maria Jose Mompean-Mejias came from Spain for a Fulbright project with MK Czerwiec and Brian Callender at Northwestern that resulted in “A Comic on the Key Elements of Clinical Communication”;
how Ana Patricia Hilario launched the “Vax-Trust Project” in Portugal; how Karin Mellberg, with support from her travel companions Carol and Sharene, “redresses” women’s suffering with super-imposed drawing on images from Tibetan Buddhism; how Ian Horton encapsulates meaning so concisely in feedback for panelists; how Jake Abrams and Georgina Potier use comics to help children in the UK overcome fear of medical procedures. I relished Ryan Montoya’s argument for “The Case for Graphic Medicine in Medical Training,” particularly cogent in a single panel that illustrates how a lifeless ICD-10 (diagnostic code) can never capture—or even approximate—a patient’s lived experience, depicted here in richly colored curvilinear form.
It was a long-awaited honor to meet (finally!) in person my collaborators on “Changing Voices,” a comic that explores gender dysphoria and gender-affirming surgery in Dutch elders.
Below are, respectively, Tineke Abma, Marie-Louise Kok, and Eveline van de Putte, our “Dutch Team,” in action at the CrossComix venue in Rotterdam, where the second half of the conference took place:
“Changing Voices” is one of the 8 original comics in Graphic Medical Ethics: A Casebook of Clinical Dilemmas from Around the World, forthcoming from Routledge in December 2026.
“War Rations” is another of the new clinical ethics cases rendered in graphic form. Of all participants who assembled in Amsterdam, Oleysa Vynnyk’s journey from Ukraine was almost certainly the most difficult.
Oleysa Vynnyk: As luck would have it, a big part of my professional journey lately is my doctoral program in bioethics and health policy at Loyola University in Chicago. The initiator of the program and my mentor, Emily, calls it “serendipity.” Looking back, this story is exactly that – an unbelievable coincidence with good consequences.
Last November, Emily kindly asked me to co-author a commentary from a bioethical perspective for a… comic book!
“Just have a look at it and you’ll understand why we need to work on this project together,” she said. Well, I never doubt her choices, so I went along. The irony was that my entire background in this field consisted of just a brief introduction to graphic medicine during the Narrative Ethics course with my mentor, Kayhan. Back then, it felt like an interesting concept; I had no idea how powerful it was.
The comic turned out to be a real-life story about the evacuation of an elderly patient who survived a stroke in the early days of the full-scale invasion in Ukraine. His son, who lived in the US, wanted to take his parents out right away. But so many challenges arose along the way, carrying heavy ethical dilemmas: Where to get proper medications in times of uncertain humanitarian supply chains? Is his physician wife going to leave behind her patients? Is the health of a patient strong enough to handle the long trip? What kind of burden does the visa officer face while serving as an executioner for the whole family? What decision should be made under the threat of war?
Emily was right – this situation totally resonated with me, both professionally and personally. At one point in the comic, the son is portrayed standing in a church in New York, praying. That is his ultimate power, a single action that can be taken at this very moment.
In those seconds of absolute uncertainty, when every logical solution seems exhausted, that quiet, desperate faith becomes the only anchor left. I believe millions of Ukrainians can find the reflection of their own life-altering experiences in that single panel.
We created a multi-perspective analysis together (well, Emily guided me through the whole process) and sent it to the author of the book.
A few months later, we received unexpectedly a kind invitation to speak at the Graphic Medicine conference in Amsterdam. We immediately agreed to join. This time, Emily participated through her slides, and I took the role of the speaker.
Finally, last week, I had a wonderful opportunity to meet the author of the book, Professor Kimberly Myers, in Amsterdam. The minute we saw each other, we instantly became friends. The “click moment” to a close friendship.
During this event, I learned that at those crucial moments when all words become useless and wasteful, comics can become an essential tool to communicate one’s emotions. I realized that important stories can be told in a fascinating way (just as Evelyn van de Putte did) and social shifts can be advocated (as Marie-Louise and Abma brilliantly demonstrated).
Medicine is outgrowing the tiny frames of traditional understanding. It is transforming into this beautiful multitude of stories, emotions, and experiences. And what makes me happy is that every single role counts. The patient is still a central figure, but the story includes all range of vital details that can influence the disease. After all, if we look closely enough, medicine has always been about a holistic approach counting very aspect of human life.
