The creative doctor: exploring the role of comics-enhanced education in medical professionalism

Medical education increasingly recognizes the need to prepare future physicians not only with biomedical expertise but also with the professional identities, skills, and reflexive capacities required to navigate uncertainty, complexity, and emotionally demanding clinical encounters. Drawing on scholarship on professional socialization and the emerging field of Graphic Medicine, this qualitative study explores how comics-enhanced education contributes to medical training. The paper reports findings from semi-structured, in-depth interviews with 14 North American medical and health professions educators who incorporate comics and graphic narratives into their teaching practices. Using a constructivist approach and template analysis, we examine educators' perspectives on the pedagogical value, limitations, and institutional challenges associated with comics-based teaching. Analysis revealed three interrelated themes describing the contribution of comics to medical education: Professional Identity formation, Professional Skills development, and Professional Implementation in clinical practice. Educators described how reading and creating comics supports students' reflection on their emerging professional identities, including emotional processing, ethical awareness, and coping with failure and uncertainty. Comics-based activities were also reported to enhance key professional skills such as empathy, communication (verbal and nonverbal), self-reflection, and awareness of bias and stigma. Finally, educators highlighted the potential of comics to improve professional practice by supporting patient-centered communication, health literacy, informed consent, and the destigmatization of illness.Despite challenges related to student resistance, institutional bias, and limited empirical evidence on outcomes, participants viewed comics as a valuable complement to traditional biomedical teaching. Overall, the study suggests that comics-enhanced education offers a creative and meaningful approach to fostering reflective, empathetic, and socially attuned medical professionals.