With RHM’s first publication year in the books, we stopped for a moment to consider how far we’ve come. In our first two double issues, our editors’ introductions reflected on creating a scholarly dwelling place and shaping the field’s social identity. As we were simultaneously working on this second double issue and our first special issue on Rhetoric of Public Health, forthcoming April of 2019, we were struck by the expansiveness of RHM.

The interrelation of scientific and aesthetic visual norms employed in anatomic sculptures opens novel and effective persuasive registers in debates around bodily autonomy. Using Damien Hirst’s installation The Miraculous Journey as a case study, this study posits that these visual representations of reproduction signify beyond the body, demonstrating the ways that pregnancy and childbirth embody political, national, and cultural possibilities. Tracing the sculptures’ adoption as evidence by anti-abortion activists in United States debates over abortion care, this article argues that the liminal disciplinary site of the sculptures makes them uniquely effective in humanizing the fetus. While there is a growing body of work examining the rhetorical function of visualizing technologies in medical practice, there is little work on the function of such images in public culture. This article responds to calls from rhetoricians of STEMM for further examination of science’s visual rhetoric, as well as greater engagement with non-expert rhetorics of science.

In the introduction to the inaugural double issue, we presented our vision for RHM’s ethos as a dwelling place (Hyde, 2004) for those doing rhetorically oriented work in health and medicine, and as an ambassadorial site for demonstrating how rhetorical study in all of its forms can inform the work of health and medicine’s wider stakeholders and practices. In this introduction, we aim to extend this call by imagining the journal as a site for building a community of practice, which, according to Etienne Wenger and Beverly Wenger-Trayner (2015), can be defined as “a group of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do, and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly” (para 1). This theory of social learning includes the three “modes of identification”1 (Wenger, 2010)—namely engagement, alignment, and imagination—through which the journal helps shape the identity of the now-emerged community of RHM scholars.

With joy and gratitude, we present the first double issue of Rhetoric of Health & Medicine (RHM), the new scholarly home for the emergent multi-and inter-disciplinary field of the same name. For us, this journal’s manifestation has been a labor of love, borne out of a commitment to advance this field for its pioneers, newcomers, members-to-be, and our various (potential) interlocutors and stakeholders. Although the rhetoric of health and medicine (RHM) has been recognized and named as a field relatively recently (for the most comprehensive accounts of its emergence, see Meloncon & Frost, 2015; Malkowski, Scott, & Keränen, 2016), threads of its scholarship began appearing at least as early as the 1980s (see Reynolds, this volume). Further, the field’s growth has been fueled by the coalescence of community through scholarly meetings (e.g., pre-conferences, conference panels and workshops, RHM Symposium) and special interest groups (e.g., CCCC Medical Rhetoric Standing Group, ARSTM); online forums (e.g., medicalrhetoric.com; Flux Facebook group); and a surprisingly expansive network of scholars and scholarship connected through publication venues (e.g., journal special issues, edited collections, scholarly encyclopedias). RHM is truly a crowd-sourced endeavor, and we are thankful to have been entrusted with it.

On the surface, “right-to-try” laws claim to benefit seriously ill patients by expanding their access to experimental medications. I suggest that a broader “Right To Try” discourse, unlike a historically significant earlier critique of FDA practice, ACT UP’s FDA Action Handbook, undercuts the possibility for what Nathan Stormer (2004) calls prosthetic thinking by eliding material experience from its consideration of medical rights. By emphasizing a language of constitutional rights, including an ill-defined belief in a right to health, Right To Try discourse participates in practices that Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky (1988) might associate with manufacturing consent, or creating the appearance of personal agency by leveraging public opinion through propaganda. In replacing medical information with language about constitutional rights, Right To Try discourse looks past the reality of physical bodies as well as conceptual bodies of medical knowledge, compromising the possibility for meaningful rhetorical articulation.

This article extends Keränen’s (2010) application of the concept of autopoiesis, or self-generation, to rhetoric by examining how arguments about wellness and natural health self-generate in public discourse. The article analyzes 20 qualitative interviews on what it means in contemporary culture to be “well”—how wellness differs from illness, how it is distinct from health, and how it can be maintained and enhanced. The analysis shows that wellness discourse is predicated on the entanglement of seemingly opposed logics of restoration and enhancement: those who seek wellness through dietary supplements and natural health products seek simultaneously to restore their bodies, perceived as malfunctioning, to prior states of ideal health and well-being, and to enhance their bodies by optimizing bodily processes to be “better than well” (Elliott, 2003). The fusing of these two logics creates an essentially closed rhetorical system in which wellness is always a moving target.