Dementia and Graphic Medicine Beyond the Living Death Narrative

Introduction

1. Picturing Illness: A History of Comics in Medicine

2. Public Expressions of Dementia: A Critical Analysis

3. “The Person Comes First”: Person-centered Care Approach

4.  “The Beatification-incarceration Spectrum”: Empowering Dementia Through Positive Verbo-Visuals

5. “A Constant Sense of Going Back to Square One”: Impact of Medical Neoliberalism on Dementia

Conclusion

Index

Biography

Laboni Das is an independent researcher and former Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Institute of Technology, Trichy, India. Her research interests include literature and medicine, comics studies, graphic medicine, and health humanities. Her research articles have appeared in Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, The Comics Grid, Journal of Medical Humanities, Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, among others. She is a recipient of the Jawaharlal Nehru Scholarship for Doctoral Studies.

Sathyaraj Venkatesan is Professor of English in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the National Institute of Technology, Trichy, India. He specializes in health humanities and comics studies, with an emphasis on graphic medicine. He is the author/co-author/editor/co-editor of ten books and over hundred research articles that span African American literature, health humanities graphic medicine, film studies, and other literary and cultural disciplines. His recent co-edited/co-authored books are Drawing the Pandemic: COVID 19 and Graphic Medicine (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025) and Pandemics and Epidemics in Cultural Representation (Springer, 2022).

“In vital contrast to the existing published literature exploring dementia and graphic medicine, which relies on close reading of a single graphic memoir, Das and Venkatesan have expanded their view by close reading six such memoirs, offering insight into a range of experiences with one of the most feared, and misunderstood, health conditions. By synthesizing varied patient, caregiver, and provider experiences, they offer critical insights into the failings of dementia care and leave the reader with ideas for future action. This is graphic medicine's strength on display: nuanced scholarship that, rather than ending with a stalwart conclusion, encourages the reader to action.”

- Matthew N. Noe, Lead Collection & Knowledge Management Librarian, Harvard Medical School, Harvard University

“Under the crush of medical neoliberalism, how is any ailment, particularly such a destabilizing and stereotyped one as dementia, able to maintain the human whose mind has become unrecognizable? Perhaps, as Venkatesan and Das boldly posit, one answer is through the potency and flexibility of visual storytelling: In a protean field, genre, tool, and movement like Graphic Medicine, a new and adaptive reality can be crafted for those individuals whose lives have become tangled and whose loved ones seek to restore their family tapestry. In the pages of comics, they can remain seen.”

- A. David Lewis, Associate Professor of English and Health Humanities, MCPHS University

“Anyone who has dealt with family members with dementia will find relief, support and even inspiration in this volume. Dementia and Graphic Medicine offers a critique of neoliberal medical care fueled by an inspiring new approach to dementia.  With their portrait of person-centered care grounded in the visual/verbal medium of comics, the authors chart a path for a more humane approach to dementia.”

- Susan Squier, Brill Professor Emerita of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and English, The Pennsylvania State University

“In Dementia and Graphic Medicine, Laboni Das and Sathyaraj Venkatesan illuminate a profoundly important and too-often-misunderstood subject with sensitivity, intelligence, and grace. Through a nuanced analysis of graphic memoirs and verbo-visual storytelling, they dismantle reductive tropes of dementia as “living death” and instead reveal the fullness of lives still rich with meaning, connection, and creativity.

This book is both scholarly and deeply humane. It expands the field of graphic medicine by demonstrating how images and words can coalesce to restore dignity and personhood, particularly within systems that so frequently erase them. The authors invite us to see differently—to witness the person within and beyond diagnosis—and in doing so, they remind us that visual storytelling can be an act of care in itself.

Dementia and Graphic Medicine is an essential contribution to health humanities and to our shared understanding of what it means to live, to remember, and to accompany others through the fragile, luminous terrain of aging and illness.”

- Maureen Burdock, author of Queen of Snails: A Graphic Memoir and Sleepless Planet: A Graphic Guide to Healing from Insomnia