The Walking Med: Zombies and the Medical Image

The zombie craze has infected popular culture with the intensity of a viral outbreak, propagating itself through text, television, film, video games, and many other forms of media. As a metaphor, zombies may represent political notions, such as the return of the repressed violence of colonialism, or the embodiment of a culture obsessed with consumerism. Increasingly, they are understood and depicted as a medicalized phenomenon: creatures transformed by disease into a threatening vector of contagion.

The Walking Med brings together scholars from across the disciplines of cultural studies, medical education, medical anthropology, and art history to explore what new meanings the zombie might convey in this context. These scholars consider a range of forms--from comics disseminated by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to graphic novels and television shows such as The Walking Dead--to show how interrogations of the zombie metaphor can reveal new perspectives within the medical humanities.

An unprecedented forum for dialogue between cultural studies of zombies and graphic medicine, The Walking Med is an invaluable contribution to both areas of study, as well as a potent commentary on one of popular culture’s most invasive and haunting figures.

In addition to the editors, the contributors are Tully Barnett, Gerry Canavan, Daniel George, Michael Green, Ben Kooyman, Sarah Juliet Lauro, Juliet McMullin, Kari Nixon, Steven Schlozman, Dan Smith, and Darryl Wilkinson.

Lorenzo Servitje is a Ph.D. candidate in English at the University of California, Riverside, and the coeditor of Endemic: Essays in Contagion Theory.

Sherryl Vint is Professor and Director of the Speculative Fiction and Cultures of Science program at the University of California, Riverside, editor of Science Fiction and Cultural Theory: A Reader, and an editor of the journals Science Fiction Studies and Science Fiction Film and Television.