As an interdisciplinary field integrating narrative medicine and visual culture, graphic medicine offers a distinctive paradigm for expanding the practice of medical humanities. Based on a systematic review of research published between 2010 and 2025, this article identifies four major areas of scholarship: the affordances of comics as the medium, applications in medical humanities education, its role in health communication, and its function in ethical critique and institutional reflection. Diverse theoretical perspectives, including visual semiotics, social semiotics, conceptual metaphor theory, and interdisciplinary insights from fields including philosophy, anthropology and sociology inform the field. However, existing research also faces several limitations, including an overly narrow research subject and cultural focus, insufficient empirical and quantitative studies, and limited integration among academic research, graphic production, and medical practice. Future research should work toward culturally sensitive multimodal analytical frameworks, expand its scope to include topics such as marginalized populations, health justice, and cross-cultural differences in narratives, and promote methodological integration and a shift toward empirical research. These efforts thereby provide a reference for the advancement of medical humanities practice in China.