We invite readers to imagine Graphic RHM as more than a column but a growing community of practice (CoP) and offer two analogies for doing so: 1) a mycelial network with connections branching across the fields of rhetoric, health and medicine, and the graphic arts, and 2) a beehive, where sustained growth comes from intentional contributions and shared effort. The comics featured in Column 2 (https://medicalrhetoric .com /graphicRHM /home /archive/column -2/), including Ann E. Fink’s “The Work of Grief,” reflect the range and depth of work emerging from this CoP.

Overall, vaccine acceptance appears to be high. But vaccine hesitancy persists nonetheless. This article draws on moral foundations theory (MFT) to rhetorically explore possibilities of storytelling within the genre of the vaccine anecdote, a form of discourse common to vaccine-skeptical discourses. Informed by social scientific accounts of the moral foundations associated with high vaccine hesitancy, I analyze three examples of pro-vaccine anecdotes—an anecdote of injury, an anecdote of conversion, and an anecdote of positive outcome—to explore strategies of personal storytelling toward the values of vaccine-hesitant publics. From the analysis, I describe three specific modes of storytelling (haunting, continuing, and intuiting) while weighing their varying promise for aligning vaccine-supportive anecdotes with mild or more extreme levels of vaccine hesitancy.

This article engages with rhetoric of health and medicine (RHM) scholarship on embodiment and expertise in online health communication to demonstrate how rhetorical tactics help patients make embodied health decisions. This study analyzes 320 online postings, 84 published narratives, 30 surveys and written reflections, and 10 interviews in an online health community for Asherman syndrome (AS), a rare illness that develops after reproductive surgery. The findings of this study highlight how patients incorporate online information into their decision-making practices by accumulating embodied knowledge, tailoring questions, insisting on specific treatments, and switching healthcare providers. This article argues that patients’ rhetorical tactics, when shared and accumulated over time, can transform treatment outcomes.

This paper explores how an intellectual account that describes eyes as cameras shapes clinical practices of measurement and correction in vision care. For patients with eye movement disorders (EMDs), which are complex, not easily treated, and often incurable, the acuity-centric system of vision care often reduces their experiences to standardized assessments that fail to address the full scope of their needs. Bringing together rhetoric of health and medicine (RHM) research, quality-of-life studies, patient testimonies, and qualitative responses from our survey of people with EMDs, we examined patients’ frustrations within a system that prioritizes acuity correction over a nuanced understanding of their complex conditions. We used the framework of the quest narrative as derived from the domains of theater and improv to highlight the multiplicity of ways that people with non-normative bodies navigate a normative infrastructure over time. This paper contributes to RHM scholarship in two primary ways: 1) by operationalizing critical disability studies critiques of biomedical normativity within care contexts and 2) detailing the care-related experiences of people defined as having rare disabilities or diseases.

This dialogue examines rural health and healthcare by putting rhetoricians who study rural communities in direct conversation with healthcare professionals who practice in and advocate for rural communities. Thematic analysis of the dialogue revealed that conversations about healthcare in rural communities can simultaneously address what rural communities lack, how rural communities are exploited, and how strong and resilient rural communities are, while also emphasizing what opportunities there are for scholars and practitioners to partner together for the benefit of rural communities. The dialogue demonstrates how working directly with key stakeholders like medical providers can be both practically and intellectually fruitful when addressing complex issues like rural health and RHM.

At the turn of the 20th century, the United States was at war with two seemingly different enemies: the first was Spanish colonial rule in Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines. The second enemy was the yellow fever virus which wreaked havoc on the physical and economic welfare of the U.S. In this essay, I conduct a rhetorical history about how the discovery of the mosquito vector for yellow fever was memorialized as a triumph of U.S. medicine, and how medical-military topoi are deployed to describe “conquest” over the virus. I argue that the nonhuman mosquito vector enables retroactive discussion of victory over an invisible enemy, creating rhetorical space between the realities of U.S imperialism and medical violence. This rhetorical history has consequences for how medical-military topoi continue to influence ways that the U.S. uses border control in response to pandemics, particularly those with nonhuman vectors or origins.

This article draws on Louis Althusser’s theory of interpellation to examine the ideology behind the language and images of a web-based video Johnson & Johnson created in 2020. The video promoted the company’s annual “Nurses Innovate QuickFire Challenge”—a grant competition for nurses’ innovations. In our analysis, we found that the video created four main discourses of care: nurses as innovators, technologies as care, nurses as heroic, ministering angels, and Johnson & Johnson as an empowerer of nurses. Building on the positive, but contested, identity of nurses as heroes during the pandemic, Johnson & Johnson’s video connected heroism with technological innovation, enacting a problematic vision of care and nursing identity that figures technological innovation as not only a responsibility but a moral obligation of nurses. Through their sponsorship of research and design work with these nurse heroes and innovators, Johnson & Johnson also bolstered its own corporate identity as a caring supporter and empowerer of nurses.

By 2050, almost 95% of the 300 living Indigenous languages are projected to be extinct. Before an Indigenous language goes extinct, the unique medicinal knowledge and practices within each tribe are often already eroded. Native medicine has health-promoting properties unique to aspects of Indigenous health and well-being, yet these benefits have slowly dwindled through the assimilation of Western medical systems. Simultaneously, the connection among Native language, medicine, healing, and cultural continuity is lost. Although the process of ancestral language learning is decreasing across Native tribes, emerging generations within Native tribes are still empowering themselves through the use of language. This commentary explores both a) the complex relationship among Indigenous languages and practices of Native healing, both historically and currently, and b) the processes of rhetorical survivance that are continuing across Native American communities.

In this commentary, we reflect on a study investigating how young people living with HIV navigated the COVID-19 pandemic and offer concrete methodological approaches to studying health inequity. We describe how participatory and narrative-based methods helped us develop five specific study protocols that reflected our commitments to equity in research: revising questions to account for local conditions of risk; intervening in histories of extractive research practices leveraged against communities at the margins; phrasing demographic questions to account for the complexity of identity; incorporating consent iteratively across the study; and offering incentives that were consistent with participants’ expertise of their own lived experiences. We use these reflections to further ongoing conversations about integrating equity into rhetorically inflected health research.

Building on mental health rhetoric research (MHRR), I explore how legal advocates in non-profit organizations guide survivors of domestic abuse in obtaining orders for protection (OFPs). State statutes not only dictate what a petition for an OFP must contain, but these statutes and resulting documents also reflect cultural and structural biases about domestic abuse. Through rhetorical analysis of state statutes and personal interviews with legal advocates in this inductive and qualitative study, I discovered that these advocates engage in subversive rhetorical intervention, what the advocates call “crafty” intervention. Such intervention is designed to meet the requirements of state statutes for an OFP and also provide a way for survivors to tell their stories in their own way. This intervention sets the stage for helping survivors heal from the trauma of domestic abuse, convincing judges that survivors need OFPs to stay safe, and demonstrating to state legislators that domestic abuse statutes may be too restrictive.

This study investigates infant feeding rhetoric from the Baby-Friendly Hospital Initiative (BFHI), a World Health Organization (WHO) and United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) partnership that prioritizes exclusive breastfeeding. The study approaches patient education materials as user documentation and analyzes the materials for kairos and metaphor. The author argued that the materials function as documentation for the birthing parent’s body operating within the system of the BFHI. The article concludes with recommendations for future research and for creating infant feeding resources that provide critical access to the healthcare system by rejecting the body-as-machine metaphor and reflecting families’ diverse situations, not just the situation of the U.S. healthcare system or BFHI.

This dialogue offers a transnational perspective on the emergence of public health officials (PHOs) as celebrities during the acute phase of the COVID-19 pandemic. Drawing on scholarship on public health rhetorics (e.g., Keränen, 2014; Malkowski & Melonçon, 2019) and on our experiences of living through the ongoing pandemic as well as observing its effects in Australia, Canada, China, and the United States, we focused our discussion on our local contexts; key public health celebrities who emerged in those contexts; changes in public reaction to those figures over time; and why the celebrification of public health figures is of interest to scholars in rhetoric of health and medicine. We close by reflecting on how our transnational discussion of public health celebrities has reshaped our understanding of celebrification in health and outline key areas of future collaboration and inquiry.

Scholars from a wide range of disciplines, including communication and rhetoric, have argued that infectious disease has been increasingly securitized in the post-9/11 environment. This essay tracks the rhetoric of seven U.S. pandemic plans from 1978 to 2017 to investigate how the evolving language of these plans supports or undermines the infectious disease securitization thesis. Our analysis reveals stark differences in the arrangement, delivery, and style of U.S. pandemic plans, despite a consistent focus on antigenic shifts of influenza A, vaccines, and medical research and development. Although U.S. pandemic plans reflect connections to security since their earliest inception, they have adopted more explicit linkages to national and global health security since 2005. This move reflects the emergence of the global health security paradigm and raises questions about pandemic planning implementation.

Celebrity-driven wellness ventures are pervasive and often spearheaded by white women, resulting in white-centric health guidance. One such venture is KINRGY, a workout and lifestyle method created by professional dancer Julianne Hough that regularly appropriates and exploits Eastern, Aboriginal, and BIPOC cultural practices. Through a critical rhetorical interrogation of the workout videos and Instagram feed of KINRGY, we assess how this method relies on cultural appropriation and New Age Orientalism to situate spirituality as the crux of universal health, thus establishing a reconfiguration of healthism into what we call “neohealthism”—a phenomenon that further obfuscates structural constraints on health, and expands the individual imperatives of healthful choices by placing metaphysical considerations on consumers’ shoulders. We theorize neohealthism through the following themes: the consumption of the Other via cultural exploitation, the question of expertise in spiritual leadership, and the intensified neoliberal imperatives that individualize health and wellness for self and the universe.

Fourteen women of color vividly illustrate their experiences of culinary spaces circa 2015 in the zine Women of Color #11: Food and Family History (hereafter WOC11). WOC11 reveals how rituals surrounding food function as vital moments for healing someone’s psyche, soul, and body. Yet, the biomedical framework for health frequently reduces eating to physiological topics like weighing the right amount. By taking us beyond biomedicine, this article examines how food practices promote wellness linked with feelings and the body. I argue that WOC11 illustrates vernacular forms of care by naming violent processes of alienation in Western foodways and commemorating food practices that encourage wellness for the zinesters’ selves, families, and communities. Scholars in rhetoric of health and medicine (RHM), the argument concludes, need to expand where and what is studied by thinking about health as physical, emotional, and spiritual wellness; such topics orient the field toward the lived realities of violence and care.

America’s individualistic culture is reflected in deeply held beliefs about how people should manage their health and their (lack of) money. In this essay, we trace the ideological discourse of individualism at macro and micro levels, explicating how macro-level discourses surrounding finances and health fulfill key functions of individualism: explanatory and evaluative as well as identity and prescriptive. For each function, we illustrate at the micro level how social adherence to discourses of individualism affects people, relationships, and communities. In particular, we argue, failure to live up to individualistic ideals fosters internalized shame and guilt and worsens mental, physical, and financial health. Grounded in critical rhetorical theory and drawing upon critical interpersonal and family communication and health communication approaches, we illustrate how individualistic discourse is circulated and taken up by people, constituting their identities and relationships. We also showcase the benefits of investigating exigent social issues from multidisciplinary vantage points.

In the context of narcotic drug epidemics, racist logics can shape policy deliberation and delimit uptake. While critical public health scholars have situated the U.S. opioid epidemic as demonstrative of such logics, in rhetoric the opioid epidemic has failed to register as an important deliberative context for representational contestation regarding race and racism. Drawing on Jürgen Habermas’ (1985) steering mediums (steurungsmedium) and Michael Omi and Howard Winant’s (2015) racial formation theory, this essay analyzes the U.S. Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 and Purdue Pharma executive J. David Haddox’s testimony before Congress to show the extent to which racial hegemony saturates juridical engagements at the federal level. Where wide-scale opioid use is concerned, this analysis demonstrates that disparate policy outcomes are largely a reflection of structural and representational inequality along racial lines. This essay thus invites scholars of health and medical rhetoric to consider how processes of controversy and medicalization function to preserve racial hegemony.

Since successful healthcare relies heavily on a practitioner’s ability to empathize with the patient, the allied health professions—like nursing and speech therapy—have long considered the possibilities and limitations of a pedagogical practice that centers empathy. In this essay, we analyze two such pedagogies: role playing with simulated patients in nursing and story sharing in a multimodal memoir group with aphasic clients in communicative sciences and disorders (CSD). Comparing theories of empathy in these fields as well as interviews with the future nurses and speech therapists participating in these experiences, we show how students engage in what we call “empathy-in-action” through both reflection and enactment and what rhetorical scholarship can gain from attending to these practices. Ultimately, we argue that putting rhetoric, nursing, and CSD in conversation deepens each field’s understanding of how empathy can be taught and learned.

RHM research brings attention to a lack of nuance in much discourse about the corporeal body,a reflection of positivist values that too often bleed into the classroom. These values can be tiedto dominant ideological frameworks for comprehending the world, including consumeristperspectives and biomedical explanations for illness and prescribed interventions. Todiscourage the tendency to gravitate towards polarized thinking, the author suggestsimmersing students in “wicked problems” that defy simplistic understandings and clearsolutions. Through a case study assignment drawing on a continuum of problems associatedwith corporate-funded research on the effects of sugar-sweetened beverages, students grapplewith a host of stakeholders and issues in the process of articulating a negotiated position that,while productive, acknowledges uncertainty.

Rhetoric of health and medicine (RHM) knowledge integrity is explored in the context of preparing RHM students, researchers, and practitioners to be careful curators and communicators of information from the medical literature. More specifically, the goal of this article is to provide a systematic framework for researching and citing claims, or “facts,” from the medical literature with transferrable skills beyond the academy. In this article, this framework is examined through the lens of science communication ethics and writer ethos to guide individuals while navigating between automation of literature databases and human agency. Furthermore, this article explores the proper citation of research claims from different genres that are published in the “medical literature” with attention to conserving the authors’ original voice. Collectively, this framework and discussion builds on prior scholarship on authorship and intellectual property in medicine.

This essay explores changes to an upper-division writing course Writing for Health Professionals in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic and the events that propelled Black Lives Matter into the media spotlight. Although instructors were required to move courses online with little time to prepare, I describe my efforts to incorporate the topics surrounding the pandemic and racial inequality into the course curriculum. The course consists of a medical ethics unit and a professional dossier; I found that both units became richer and more helpful to students by incorporating the context and kairotic moment in readings, class discussions, weekly forum posts, and major assignment options.

This dialogue works to situate Rhetorics of Reproductive Justice (RRJ) within Rhetorics of Health and Medicine (RHM) to explore how these two areas might enhance and inform one another. Through conversations with eight scholars who see their work as creating connections between RRJ and RHM, and through a series of reflective, interstitial comments, this dialogue examines current and future possibilities for work that bridges RRJ and RHM, and critically links RHM scholarship to social injustices reproductive bodies encounter.

Review Essay of the following RHM Books: Lawrence, Heidi Yoston. (2020). Vaccine rhetorics. Columbus, OH: The Ohio State University Press. pp. 172. Hardcover $99.95.    Pender, Kelly. (2018). Being at genetic risk: Toward a rhetoric of care. University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press. pp. 184. Hardcover $69.95.     Rowland, Allison L. (2020). Zoetropes and the politics of humanhood. Columbus: OH: The Ohio State University Press. pp. 190. Hardcover $99.95.

Abstract: Standardized Patient Programs (SPPs) enlist actors to roleplay the symptoms of various diseases and disorders, and to embody a range of personalities. These simulations are used to help improve the communicative practices and professional competencies of future healthcare workers. Focusing on the use of these programs for medical students and doctors, this article establishes a kairology of the SPP to better understand the shifting terrains of patient representation. A kairological account focuses on “historical moments as rhetorical opportunities” (Segal, 2005, p. 23) and, in the case of medicine, illustrates how “changes in [medical] practice are importantly reciprocal with changes in the terms of practice” (Segal, 2005, p. 22). I trace the SPP through various linguistic iterations to reveal how the shifting language of simulated patienthood reflects different orientations towards medical pedagogy and patient populations at significant junctures in time. I conclude my kairology with an examination of the Indigenous Simulated Patient Program, a 2011 pilot program that has the potential to better represent and serve Indigenous peoples in medical pedagogy and practice.

Humira® has been the top selling pharmaceutical since 2014. As a former Humira® user, for the treatment of Crohn’s disease, I explore how we understand the concept and experience of chronicity as it is represented in advertisements for Humira® and manifested in embodied reactions to these advertisements. Through a layered narrative method that combines rhetorical analysis with autoethnography, I analyze 13 Humira® commercials. I argue that Humira® commercials operate through a curative imaginary (Kafer, 2013), which not only assumes viewers desire to be immune-typical but also defines normative orientations to time. This case study reveals how direct-to-consumer pharmaceutical advertising obscures cultural and systemic sources of (dis)ablism, including the ways striving for normalcy is in and of itself an experience of chronicity, and disregards experiences of chronicity that disrupt normalizing boundaries of time.

Alzheimer’s disease (AD), a neurodegenerative disease that progresses along a fluctuating course of changing capacities, affects approximately 5.7 million Americans, an estimate expected to skyrocket as the baby boomer generation ages. Adopting a rhetorical field methods approach I analyze the transcripts of qualitative interviews of 3 patients and 28 caregivers to understand how the chronicity of AD affects informal caregiving strategies as well as the lived experiences of persons with AD. Employing a new materialist framework along with rhetorical enactment theory, I posit chronicity as rhetorical action distributed not only among human and nonhuman agents but also across moments, requiring special attention to time and timing. I argue chronic illness is rhetorically enacted through three material-discursive practices: ontological practices that enact reality, alignment practices that facilitate or disrupt cooperation among entities, and mnemonic practices that enact and outsource memory among AD caregivers. Across all three kinds of practice, a material-discursive sense of kairos and chronos is advanced.

On March 10, 2019, 60 Minutes reported the development of a potentially life-altering gene therapy for Sickle Cell Disease (SCD). Despite this therapy’s potential for cure, SCD community members’ reactions ranged from skepticism to fear due to the use of deactivated HIV as a vector for transporting the corrected gene into stem cells, thus repairing the faulty gene in SCD. Using a mental models framework, we analyze how 60 Minutes attempted to explain this research and how audiences reacted on social media. Specifically, we show how 60 Minutes’ treatment of given versus new information, as well as the journalists’ failure to account for the specific audiences with the most at stake, led to misunderstandings that contributed to ongoing fear and mistrust of the scientific community. We conclude with recommendations for how journalists should approach accommodating science when that science has particular impacts on minoritized and marginalized groups.

This essay provides an overview of my experiences teaching Rhetoric of Health and Medicine (RHM) courses with an explicit health justice focus. I ground a discussion of pedagogical possibility by reflecting on my emerging course design, which centers reproductive justice—one example of a justice-oriented framework—as a site of learning and inquiry. In describing my course development and delivery, I suggest that a health justice approach to RHM instruction can be timely, contextually relevant, and challenging. Throughout the essay, I offer specific examples for the purposes of replication or adaptation for differently justice-oriented RHM teaching applications.

This past decade, the healthcare industry has undergone a transformation with where, how, and why writing happens. For example, what the health and medical professions conceive of as “documentation” or “charting” is writing, even though practitioners call it by another name. Additionally, most writing in healthcare settings is now also multimodal, incorporating textual, digital, visual, and aural content. This essay focuses on the patient decision aid as pedagogical tool that embraces the technological and multimodal changes in health and medicine. Patient decision aids can be understood as a multimodal tool guiding shared decision-making practices. As a genre, the decision aid prompts students to engage in a series of writing modalities – visuals, narrative, texts – as well as the application of user experience and design. Finally, the decision aid as an assignment offers explicit connections between humanities-based students and broader healthcare industries.

In 1907, the National Tuberculosis Association (NTA) began selling Christmas Seals to raise money for the fight against tuberculosis (TB). The decorative holiday stamps quickly became a hallmark of American popular culture throughout much of the 1900s. This project asks how the Christmas Seals, sold between 1920 and 1968, shaped the depiction, imaginary, and understanding of tuberculosis in popular culture. Through visual, rhetorical analysis of the Seals’ presented and suggested elements, I show that the Seals make present normalized images of Whiteness, health, and holiday settings. I argue that the Seals presented elements made absent images of tuberculosis, distancing an invoked, White audience from the realities of the disease and playing on their hope and desire for a world free of TB. This case study considers the rhetorical function and value of popular, non-­medical expert images, adds to the historical literature on tuberculosis, and offers a framework for the continued study of medical fundraising images.

This manuscript explores the rhetorical coupling of food as a holistic health initiative across two Indigenous organizations—Indian Health Services (IHS) and the American Indian Cancer Foundation (AICF). Drawing upon contemporary literatures of rhetorical ecologies, I position “kincentricity” (Salmón, 2000, 2012) as a particularly provocative framework to reconceptualize the body as its own rhetorical ecosystem, contending that Indigenous dimensions of RHM offer radically creative ways to decolonize the body/body politic. My analysis demonstrates theways in which IHS and AICF engage in kincentric logics to repurpose rhetorics of food within the Native medicine wheel, most notably by emphasizing (1) pre-Columbian diets, (2) traditional harvesting and cooking methods, and (3) spiritual food-based rituals—all of which explicitly link tribal food(ways) to bodily wellbeing. Finally, this essay encourages RHM scholars to reorient rhetorical vocabularies and understandings toward more pluralistic and non-Western accounts of health, medicine, and collective wellness.

The public’s declining trust in health advice from traditional outlets has long been noted by scholars. But what makes alternative sources for health information appear more trustworthy to some audiences? In this analysis, the author traces the use of expertise and experience as forms of multivocality in the textual artifacts of Gwyneth Paltrow and her enterprise, Goop—specifically those that promote clean eating and detox diets. The analysis illustrates how Goop creates a superficially neutral platform for different voices that make the texts seem polyphonic and by extension more trustworthy given that readers can choose which health plan is right for them. But upon further analysis the author illustrates that Goop blends each voice so that they “move in step” as a choir, combining with Paltrow’s own voice, and ultimately creating an illusion of polyphony and masking a dominant homophonic message that ties together mandates to “ask questions,” empower ourselves, and embrace the assumption that young, slender bodies are signifiers of health and wellness.

This article explores how food-related practices are discursively constructed in an employee wellness program (EWP). Drawing on qualitative grounded theory analyses of internal-and external-facing EWP materials, the author theorizes how food-related practices, technology, institutional power, and wellness intersect. By entwining health, medicine, and food under the umbrella of wellness, the EWP promotes food-as-wellness (eating the right foods will lead to individual holistic well-being by improving the already-healthy person) while incenting and effectuating food-as-medicine (eating the right foods can help cure individual illness/disease or intervene as a treatment for a disease risk factor such as overweight or obesity) because of food-as-economics (collectively eating the right foods can help solve rising health insurance costs). The theory advanced in this article expands our understanding of wellness discourses and points to the need for research examining how such discourse impacts lived experience.

This manuscript explores the rhetorical coupling of food as a holistic health initiative across two Indigenous organizations—Indian Health Services (IHS) and the American Indian Cancer Foundation (AICF). Drawing upon contemporary literatures of rhetorical ecologies, I position “kincentricity” (Salmón, 2000, 2012) as a particularly provocative framework to reconceptualize the body as its own rhetorical ecosystem, contending that Indigenous dimensions of RHM offer radically creative ways to decolonize the body/body politic. My analysis demonstrates theways in which IHS and AICF engage in kincentric logics to repurpose rhetorics of food within the Native medicine wheel, most notably by emphasizing (1) pre-Columbian diets, (2) traditional harvesting and cooking methods, and (3) spiritual food-based rituals—all of which explicitly link tribal food(ways) to bodily wellbeing. Finally, this essay encourages RHM scholars to reorient rhetorical vocabularies and understandings toward more pluralistic and non-Western accounts of health, medicine, and collective wellness.

Drawing from my experience conducting an interview-based study on vaccine hesitancy, this essay explores the ethical negotiations RHM researchers face when recruiting participants from online communities, and especially communities that are stigmatized or otherwise distrustful of researchers. I discuss the specific challenges I faced during this process, and offer four suggestions for researchers engaged in this work. These include the valuable role of reflexive journaling, the need for participant input in the distribution of recruitment messages, the importance of accounting for the dynamic nature of online communication, and the ways that participant communication online may shape off-line interactions. This essay can offer guidance to RHM scholars facing similar situations, and contribute to the broader conversation about practice-level ethical concerns in RHM research involving online communities

As the introduction to this issue makes clear, the ethical exposure essays we include here are the start of an ongoing initiative in the journal—to include focused sections of shorter pieces on critical threads or matters of concern in ongoing RHM work, in this case ethical conundra encountered in practice-level enactments of methodologies. In setting the tone for this special section, we now attempt to parse an “ethics in praxis” that is characterized by situational, embodied, and reflexive orientations rather thanby attributes more common in virtue ethics. This emphasis on praxis allows us to put forward an idea of ethics in and for RHM that is responsive to critique as we articulate it in the overall introduction to this issue: as kairos-driven and attuned to crises as they unfold in the present and as they anticipate and offer opportunities to “play” at various imagined futures.

We argue that by using existing data and sharing research in a databank, RHM scholars can practice a research habit that conserves and optimizes intellectual and institutional resources. When possible, by using existing datasets, scholars avoid data waste, that is ignoring or bypassing existing data. The data distinctions that we call attention to—derived, compiled, and designed—account for various ethical and rhetorical concerns regarding privacy and confidentiality, expected context, and consent. Equally important to the aforementioned data deliberations we explore, collecting and managing shared RHM data in a databank, while possible, are not without ethical, logistical, and rhetorical difficulties.

The following commentary follows on and flows out of an initial response to reading “Multiple Voices on Authorship and Authority in Biomedical Publications” by DeTora and colleagues (2020), which appeared in volume 3 issue 4 of Rhetoric of Health and Medicine. This response, by rhetorician of science, health, and medicine Celeste Condit, begins by situating questions about authorship and authority in biomedicine against a classical rhetorical source, Plato’s Gorgias. In so doing, Condit identifies a messy truth—that rhetoric potentially can pose dangers when applied to health and medicine. The authors then construct a Platonic dialogue that situates authorship, ethos, and authority in the context of biomedicine. Ultimately, the two authors illustrate the messiness that results when attempting to mount a discussion of these terms across intellectual registers.

Building connections with professionals in subject matter disciplines—practitioners and/or academics—is a growing area of interest for many scholars working in the rhetoric of health and medicine (RHM). However, strategies for creating and building meaningful, productive interdisciplinary relationships has not been a central theme in RHM-focused scholarship. This entry endeavors to address this gap by using RHM’s emerging version of the “dialogue” genre to describe the author’s experience co-chairing the communications track for an international public health conference. The author weaves in commentary from contributors who participated in the conference and discusses and reflects upon two key challenges that emerged: 1) differences in language choice/terminology, and 2) epistemic conflict. Through this reflective discussion, this dialogue proposes several strategies that RHM scholars might draw from in building their own interdisciplinary relationships moving forward: 1) negotiate shared meanings and goals, 2) find commonalities, and 3) normalize rhetorical inquiry. 
 Featured Contributors: Nicholas Bustamante, MFA; Alina Deshpande, PhD; Amy Ising, MS; Jamie Newman, PhD; Kirk St.Amant, PhD

Being at Genetic Risk: Toward a Rhetoric of Care. Kelly Pender. University Park, PA, The Pennsylvania State Press, 2018. 174 pages, $69.95 hardcover. Publisher webpage: https://www.psupress.org/books/titles/978-0-271-08212-7.html

This dialogue is focused on community-based participatory research (CBPR) part¬nerships that can shape public health research in RHM and health communica¬tion. The dialogue is based on a roundtable discussion that was held at the 2019 meeting of the Central States Communication Association in Omaha, Nebraska. Based on our experiences conducting CBPR across different areas of communica¬tion and public health, we oriented our dialogue around four key themes that seemed central to understanding CBPR in rhetoric of health and medicine (RHM): 1) defining community and CBPR; 2) discussing research methods and engaging community stakeholders; 3) considering ethics, and; 4) assessing out¬comes of CBPR. Based on this dialogue, we conclude with implications and applications, as well as further references for interested RHM and health com¬munication scholars.

To ascertain the risk assessments parents use when making vaccine decisions, I conducted semi-structured interviews with mothers of young children. Treating these interviews as texts, I rhetorically analyzed how parents talk about their chil­dren’s vaccination in order to better understand reasons for vaccine hesitancy. My analysis reveals that despite the difference in behavior between parents who vac­cinate and parents who hesitate, there is a commonality in discourse. Three topoi emerged within these mothers’ explanation of their vaccination decisions: percep­tions of diseases, perceptions of environmental threats, and assessment of their child’s vulnerability. Considering the common ground these topoi reflect, I explore possible alternative messaging about vaccines that might better encourage vaccine uptake. Ultimately, I argue a rhetorical approach to studying public and personal discourses about health issues can prove useful for identifying key topoi, which can generate communication strategies for addressing public concerns while potentially improving support for public health initiatives

The modern view of addiction as a progressive brain disease originated in the sec­ond half of the 19th and early decades of the 20th centuries. Historians attribute the shift from a moral to a medical concept to the efforts of a small but well-organized band of physicians forming what is known as the Inebriety Movement in the United States and Great Britain. Members aimed to distribute the disease theory to a dis­interested and biased medical community, establish protocols for evidence-based treatments, and transfer the management of drinkers and drug users away from religious organizations and penal institutions to the care of trained practitioners. Members’ efforts to rhetorically achieve these goals on the pages of medical jour­nals has received scant attention in the scholarly community. Based on an analysis of 92 medical articles on addiction published between 1870 and 1930, I will reveal a complex, inclusive, and multimodal rhetoric employed to refigure “drunkards” and “underworld” drug “fiends” as patients and their confounding addictive behaviors as symptoms rather than signs of degeneracy. Before advanced under­standing of brain’s pleasure circuits and dopamine receptors, these early medical authors dramatically rendered the havoc that substances can play on those sys­tems. Recovering the narratives and patient tropes I find in these texts may be instructive as we try to find ways to erase persistent stigma surrounding addiction. My findings will hopefully encourage dialogue and new research pathways for scholars interested in the rhetorical history of addiction.

Although healthcare providers’ decision-making is informed by data and proto­cols for care, recent research suggests that individuals’ intuition—which integrates previous experiences with situational awareness and sensory knowledge—also plays a large role in directing action. Drawing on two different datasets from research on EMS providers and nurses in clinical nursing simulations, this article intro­duces a taxonomy for the various cues that trigger intuitive action and unpacks how intuition manifests at different stages of care. We argue that healthcare providers rhetorically navigate a wide range of both external and internal intuitive cues, and that external cues draw on sensory engagement with bodies, technology, and the environment as well as collaborative interpersonal exchanges. Intuition, then, is more than an unconscious ability to inform action—it is a type of intelligence that develops from experience, and from the ability to be attuned to the surrounding environment and material conditions of a workplace. By creating a taxonomy for articulating intuition’s complex and diverse cues, this article aims to provide both rhetoricians of health and medicine and healthcare providers with an impetus for recognizing and valuing its key role in patient care.

Climate change, the obesity epidemic, plastic pollution, the opioid crisis—for the last several decades, there has been a growing awareness of the chal­lenges posed by what are sometimes called “wicked problems” (Rittel & Webber, 1973). These problems—marked by complex intersecting socioeconomic and/or biogeophysical causes—constitute real and immediate threats to humans, nonhumans, societies, and ecologies. What’s more—given their scale and multicausal nature, so-called wicked problems resist most of the options available in our standard repertoires of tech fixes and social programs. The very nature of wicked problems requires the develop­ment of mitigation strategies that integrate human and nonhuman agen­cies. Identifying effective strategies is, of course, no easy task. As a bare minimum first step, doing so requires bringing together the kinds of experts, policymakers, stakeholders, and citizens who are well-suited to address the particulars of the wicked problem at hand.

In this essay, we interrogate the power of sensory rhetorics to craft what Jenell Johnson (2016) defines as a “visceral public”: a public bound by intense, shared feeling over a perceived threat of boundary violations. Specifically, we situate miasma—that environmental degeneracy produces bad smells carrying disease—as a historical disease etiology overtaken, but not fully displaced, by the insights of germ theory. This sanitary-bacteriological-synthesis is capable of constitutingvisceral publics so adeptly because germ theory’s explanatory power as a disease etiology continues to rely on the rhetoric of sight and smell as a set of publicly accessible sensory engagements. To illustrate the raced, classed, and gendered consequences of this sanitary-bacteriological-synthesis, we offer a comparative analysis of two images of disease capturing the public imagination: the early 20th century typhoid fever and the 2015–2016 Zika virus outbreak.

Introduction to the special issue on public health. What the first year of RHM illustrates is that much of the work done by rhetoricians of health and medicine intervenes in pubic conversations either implicitly or explicitly. And when it comes to matters of rhetorical public(s) and the connection to health, more work remains to be done around the concept of “the public” as a linguistic and practical commonplace. Thus, this special issue brings into sharp focus the necessity to coordinate efforts to explore the network of meaning and actions associated with the conceptualization and management of disease and well-being across populations, borders, and histories so as to present a new commonplace of the rhetoric of public health.

Debates over medicine and biotechnology have often had recourse to science fiction narratives. One narrative, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, is unique in that both proponents and opponents of research treated references to the novel as a legitimate rhetorical strategy. This essay uses debates from 1998 to 2003 over embryonic stem cell research and cloning to illustrate two types of references to Huxley’s novel. Allusions to the novel identify the presence and salience of ethical concerns, acting as an opening gambit in public discourse. Allegorical uses yoke the novel to a narrow pretext of conservative bioethics. After identifying the contours of allusion and allegory, this essay argues for eschewing allegory in order to preserve a rhetorical commonplace for public discourse on medicine and biotechnology.

Considering aurality (hearing) and sonicity (sounds/noises) in our research sites promises much for rhetoric of health and medicine (RHM) scholars. To show this value, I argue aural awareness of soundscapes provide opportunities to sensorially enrich our understanding of sonic experiences in acute care hospital settings, as in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) site at the center of my case study. To that end, the purpose of this article is threefold: 1) to identify aurality as a sensorial aspect in healthcare sensescapes worthy of RHM inquiry; 2) to foreground how these soundscapes shape care and caretaking in healthcare and clinical settings; and 3) to propose more careful considering and attending, as “earwitnesses,” to the sonic experiences of bodies in these settings. In the process, I propose “rhetorical ventriloquism” as a useful, responsible concept to consider how these sounds and noises appear to stand in for bodies and their physiologies and shape those bodies’ care, while amplifying those bodies as the healthcare technologies speak and sound for them. Furthermore, I suggest RHM scholars can act as earwitnesses who attend to sonicity and aurality in healthcare and clinical settings, as well as study how people are sensorially trained in these settings. CLICK HERE TO ACCESS SOUND FILES