A challenge for Graphic Medicine is its being juxtaposed alongside biomedical and scientific fields of work that operate largely in the realm of statistics and quantifiable analytics. Often, the scholarship in Graphic Medicine comes without numbers. It is anecdotal, experiential, aesthetic/literary, or theoretical, customarily, and only occasionally calculable.
This is neither a flaw nor weakness of Graphic Medicine, but it is also adaptable. If practitioners and clinicians utilizing elements of Graphic Medicine so choose, they can opt to perform further studies on its measurable effects. This is not a matter of if but when; this is not a matter of opportunity but will.
To that end, the following annotated bibliography is being offered to highlight just a few of the cases where Graphic Medicine has already delivered quantifiable results. The sources cut across several different populations (children, parents, medicals students, patients, etc.) and several different medical situations (hospital discharge, university classes, patient empathy, etc.). As a whole, though, they demonstrate quantifiable approaches to the field and provide an initial proving ground for expanded studies of Graphic Medicine’s impact on healthcare.