This essay examines the persuasive elements of one of the most influential books of the current era in psychiatry: Peter Kramer’s 1993 Listening to Prozac. That book, a text laden with the value of the hyperthymic (optimistic, charismatic, confident)personality, has been praised for illuminating questions of mood and identity, and blamed for ushering in an era of “cosmetic pharmacology”—and for making Prozac an object at the center of promiscuous prescription. The essay revisits depression, Kramer’s signal concern, in a post/pandemic exigence when millions, perhaps billions, of people come to meet the diagnostic criteria for that “disorder.” In many cases, mental-illness diagnosis, as a rhetorical act and a speech act, shifts a problem from social conditions of precarity and inequity, for example, to personal conditions of pathology. How did Kramer participate in making a capacious and biological view of depressed mood so persuasive, and why does it matter that he did?

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.

In this essay I bring together two spaces—street needle exchange and the university classroom—to explore harm reduction as an epistemological model that can be adapted pedagogically in our rhetoric, communications, and composition classes. I first identify capitalism in the classroom as an insistence on mastery and the relentless call to know, acquire, and achieve. I then offer harm reduction, a public health practice that rejects these iterations of capitalism, to instead ask how we might meet students where they are and how we might forego the rewards of telos for the discomfort of process and mess. I’ll argue in this piece that reducing the harms of capitalist-based writing and knowledge requires considered attention to the ways we are lured toward production (what we might even call “deliverables”). I explore the epistemological nodes of harm reduction—its emphasis on temporality and its privileging of process—as methods for teaching writing, rhetoric, and communications while also offering a pedagogical case study along the way.

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.

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.

Extensive evidence demonstrates that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s multimedia anti-smoking campaign, Tips from Former Smokers, is an effective public health measure. In this essay, I explain the rhetorical appeals utilized in the campaign that contribute to its resonance, arguing that the campaign invokes corporeal anxiety, an emotion that emerges from societal aversion to disability. These appeals to corporeal anxiety operate as enthymemes by relying upon an unstated premise: that disability is negative and ought to be avoided to preserve one’s normalcy. This analysis treats the campaign messages as a form of bodily rhetoric and visual argument, arguing that the campaign deters smoking through graphic bodily imagery and narratives of lost normalcy that conceptualize disability as tragedy or deficit. I conclude that the success of the campaign comes at the expense of perpetuating stigma against people with disabilities.

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.

According to a December 21, 2018, Michigan Attorney General report, at least 105 Michigan State University employees, between 1997 and 2015, had received complaints from women about Dr. Larry Nassar’s inappropriate touching during medical treatment. In 2014, one of these complaints was finally reported to MSU’s Title IX office, triggering an investigation that led to a report that concluded Dr. Larry Nassar’s methods of treatment were “medically appropriate” and cleared him of any wrongdoing. Rhetorical analysis of this report exposes how Nassar benefitted from a rhetorical infrastructure that was designed to offer him institutional protection as an expert in medical techniques that require extensive touching of patients. Such analysis also exposes the specific discursive practices that sustain the rhetorical infrastructures that enable this institutional protection.

Abstract  Guided by normative rhetorical theory, this study utilizes thematic analysis to explore narratives about sterilization consultations posted by childfree patients and medical providers to Reddit. This study explores the multiple meanings of sterilization, the paradoxical dilemmas competing conversational purposes create, and the communicative practices, interpretive lenses, and environmental resources patients and providers employ to manage dilemmas. The analysis reveals that voluntary sterilization inheres task, relational, and identity meanings for both patients and providers, creating paradoxical dilemmas and rendering sterilization consultations additionally challenging to navigate. Patients and providers both accept and confront paradox, adopt cultural and contextual interpretive lenses to evaluate others’ talk, and rely on childfree patient and physician social networks as environmental resources to shift the context in which talk occurs. The conclusion offers theoretical implications for normative rhetorical theory and practical implications, including: illuminating features influencing interactions in which sterilization requests are made and evaluated, and underscoring the multiple meanings that constrain patients and providers during these consultations.

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.

This article considers how scientists and other researchers frame and integrate online patient registry data into their work. In the case of rare chronic conditions, online patient registry data extend the geographic boundaries that limit research involvement and make efficient use of limited federal funding for research. Through a rhetorical analysis of peer-reviewed journal articles, which I evaluate as artifacts, I show how a selection of them seek to recognize patients’ labor through traditional acknowledgements and provide tangible benefits to patient communities. At the same time, the proliferation of online patient registries and lack of publications suggests that patients’ labor is often overlooked and disregarded. This work reveals how online patient data registries change our understanding and approach to researching chronicity. I conclude by offering ethical considerations for rhetoricians who choose to use and publish data from these registries.

Special Issue Editors' Introduction, Rhetoric of Chronicity

Editors' introduction to 5.1

Review of Translanguaging Outside the Academy; Negotiating Rhetoric and Healthcare in the Spanish Caribbean, Rachel Bloom-Pojar, Urbana, Illinois: Conference on College Composition and Communication/National Council of Teachers of English, 2018. 161 pages, $29.99.

Our article uses case studies of two civilian emergency response mHealth apps—PulsePoint and OD Help—to theorize the ways the mobile mapping functionality embedded in these tools, which is integrated with the Google Maps platform, enables yet also constrains users’ agential practices. Using an interface rhetoric approach, we unpack assumptions related to the embodied contexts of use facilitated by this functionality within the unique scenario of civilian emergency response. We argue that interactions between and among humans and these apps’ mapping interfaces involve complex, negotiated, contextually situated enactments, which align with a posthumanist perspective toward agency. At the same time, these interactions may also inadvertently amplify the precarity of vulnerable groups. Better understanding the ways that mobile mapping technologies shape agential enactments, particularly in ways that affect precarious and dispossessed populations, has important implications for the design of mHealth technologies—and the users who rely on them—moving forward.

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.

In this article, I analyze the trigger warning, a pedagogical practice often framed as student-responsive and trauma-informed, to elucidate the ways in which trauma-informed pedagogy functions rhetorically to pathologize and individualize experiences of racism and other societal inequities that cause collective trauma. I draw upon original interview data and rhetorical analysis through a systems framework to explore how reductive pedagogical practices developed within the confines of a white, western notion of trauma may subsequently perpetuate students’ marginalization. Finally, I highlight the potential for more comprehensive, inclusive pedagogies to address student trauma, acknowledge societal conditions that impact individual experiences, and shift popular discourse that pathologizes trauma.

Complex health and medical contexts demand not only responsive, mutable research but also responsive, flexible pedagogies. Arguing for a shift from the dominant conception of pedagogy as a pre-planned, linear scaffold, this article proposes instead an approach—called Lego™ Learning—that re-conceptualizes instructional content as self-standing, short-term units or modules, much like Lego™ bricks. Because such modules have self-contained learning objectives and corresponding tasks, they can be shifted within a course or across courses as-needed. This approach allows rhetoric of health and medicine (RHM) instructional content to respond to, and prepare students for, the ever-changing exigencies and contexts of RHM-related work. It also encourages collaborations across classes, institutions, and other contexts. In this entry, we frame our discussion around four learning outcomes and teaching practices that can be facilitated through this approach, and we provide an extended example of an ongoing cross-institutional partnership that employs Lego™ Learning.

Using the 1980s Centers for Disease Control’s (CDC) surveillance definitions for AIDS, this article examines how the CDC’s rhetorical techniques may have been harnessed to create more inclusive AIDS morbidity and mortality data in the U.S. epidemic’s first decade. The CDC’s decision to privilege disease specificity over sensitivity led women, people of color, and drug users to be underrepresented in epidemiological reporting due to AIDS’s manifestation as more commonly seen—­and therefore less specific—­diseases in these populations. My analysis of the first three AIDS definitions shows heavy reliance on four classical topoi as the CDC sought to constrain who was and was not considered an AIDS case for national reporting. I argue that, while these four topoi—­space, time, correlation, and causation—­did constrain symptoms to the desired specificity, the CDC had the ability to place similar specifications on common diseases for the sake of including vulnerable communities in surveillance data.

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.

According to a recent study by the Brookings Institution (Reeves & Krause, 2016), vasectomies are safer, more effective, and less expensive than most other voluntary sterilization methods. While the procedure has grown in popularity in recent years, particularly in the United Kingdom and Canada, it is much less common in the United States. This discrepancy can be attributed to both social (a perception that contraception is “women’s work”) and policy-­based factors (lack of coverage under the Affordable Care Act). This paper examines the role and extent to which invitational rhetoric could be a useful communicative lens for both partners and providers considering vasectomies, thus increasing access to and utilization of the safe, effective, and affordable procedure. In this policy brief, we suggest strategies for incorporating invitational rhetoric into health professions education curricula, patient counseling literature, and policy language in order to address some of the social stigma around the procedure.

This dialogue piece provides scholars of the rhetoric of health and medicine with a close examination of vegan and vegetarian diets/lifestyles through the perspective of several scholars, activists, and/or medical practitioners. Through these conversations, the authors illuminate many key areas of interest and future examination related to vegan and vegetarian diets through the lens of several subtopics including health impact, ethics, cultural influence on diet, gender, medical advice, emerging “meat” technologies, and societal rhetoric about vegans and vegetarians.The dialogue participants provide a discussion on how vegetarian diets—and vegan diets in particular—can progress individual and public human health, liberate non-human animals, improve the environment, and provide a vehicle in which several important social justice movements (for both humans and animals) can take root, all the while recognizing the many reasons reasons people might choose a vegetarian or vegan diet.

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.

Applying an ecological rhetorical approach, this article examines the online circulation of arguments about food choice in two seemingly disparate sites: clean, medicinal food rhetoric and the rhetoric of “food swamps.” Studying snack food conglomerate Mondelez International’s “Mindful Snacking” campaign in juxtaposition with clean eating brand Sakara Life’s “made-for-Instagram” marketing materials demonstrates how clean, medicinal food texts emerge as acts of communicative resistance to the normalization of fast and processed food, yet slip back into the same meritocratic logic emphasizing individual responsibility and ultimately reproduce the ideological conditions that maintain inequitable access to healthy food. This article concludes with suggestions for disrupting and transforming the pervasive individualizing frameworks of food choice that locate health and diet concerns in the individual as opposed to the wider political, economic, and environmental context.

Guest editor's introduction to the special issue on the rhetoric of food and health.

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.

Guest editor's introduction to the special issue on the rhetoric of food and health.

Review of: White-Farnham, J., Siegel Finer, B., & Molloy, C. (Eds.) (2020). Women's health advocacy: Rhetorical ingeniuty for the 21st century. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429201165

This article considers the problem of conflicting researcher obligations in RHM, particularly when professional medical rhetoric is analyzed with the goal of improving patient care. Taking one case as illustrative, this article argues that medical professional participants are in positions of relative power, and that their choice to participate in RHM research or not can have downstream effects on more vulnerable patients. Furthermore, this case demonstrates that the interests of medical professional participants may diverge from the interests of their patients. As a result, when RHM researchers assume traditional orientations towards medical professional research participants, they may find themselves unable to advocate for more vulnerable patient populations.

This article examines the rhetorical effects of a rape accusation on the survivor and on the survivor’s community of social justice activists. Relying on interviews with the survivor and with the community affected by the allegation, the article analyzes responses to the allegation, articulates how those responses are informed by rape culture, and illustrates how those responses affected the survivor and her rhetorical agency. The article argues that rhetorical agency can be productively distributed across various allies to assist survivors and help restore the rhetorical agency that rape erodes. Establishing sexual assault as a public health issue, the article recommends broad education in rhetorical listening to improve how those entrusted to hear assault stories listen, respond, and, when appropriate, help survivors speak or act.

This paper explores how I navigated the complicated terrain of opposition research during the dissertation phase of my doctoral program. Drawing from ethnographic research conducted on a pro-life organization, I illustrate that care-based ethics (Held, 2006; Tronto, 1994) is not just for vulnerable and agreeable participants but is valuable and appropriate for researching powerful groups whom we oppose. Furthermore, I argue that rhetorical listening (Glenn & Ratcliffe, 2011; Ratcliffe, 1999, Ratcliffe, 2005) is not just a valuable methodological approach to research, but also a form of reciprocity, especially critical when studying groups we oppose. Such an approach promotes the mutually beneficial goals of respect and understanding.

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 intersection of industry sponsorship, government regulation, academic interests, and medical journals is a core interest in biomedical research, and one that overlaps with concerns in the rhetoric of health and medicine (RHM). At stake in conversations about this intersection are authority and participation: who is and is not invited to offer opinions and, even when invited, whose opinions are taken seriously. Following, colleagues with ties to the International Society of Medical Publication Professionals (ISMPP) present their ideas in response to questions about authorship and authority posed by another, who is also an RHM scholar. The answers of medical journal editors and publications professionals employed by corporate entities largely align with the view that both authorship and authority should be determined by scientific practice and knowledge rather than power relations or politics. A philosopher who gave an invited plenary talk at the national ISMPP meeting and participated in the organization’s first white paper offers a different perspective, considering the ways that fields self-constitute in part by bounding authority and authorship.

Over the last several decades there have been rapid advancements in treatment options available for infertility. Consequently, infertility has become a medicalized disease, which privileges a masculine epistemology. Problematically, this masculinist perception of infertility diminishes concern for the lived experiences of women living with infertility and ignores the many ways in which infertility manifests as a social condition. This study examines narratives of women diagnosed with infertility, gathered from online support groups. Through these narratives I introduces the concept of “invitational knowledge” as a means to understand how knowledge functions rhetorically to create space for discourses that deviate from the medicalized assumptions of infertility. Invitational knowledge highlights the epistemological roots of invitational rhetoric through adoption of a postmodern feminist epistemology and is characterized by five features: 1) rhetor agency; 2) emotional knowledge; 3) transformative discourse; 4) shared knowledge; and 5) asking questions rather than making judgments.

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.

Weight-inclusive approaches such as Health at Every SizeÒ (HAESÒ) that once were used primarily by scientists or other health experts are more frequently being taken up by lay audiences. Most notably, popular members of online communities known as social media influencers rely on principles of HAESÒ to spread weight-neutral rhetoric across platforms like Instagram. Analyzing how influencers domesticate, or make their own, the specific science-based principles of HAESÒ warrants exploration. In this study, I draw from an analysis of 20 Instagram accounts run by influencers to explicate how domestication occurs within the body positive and weight-inclusive community. The findings suggest three primary patterns through which domestication occurs: anecdotal narratives and personalization, science and education, and social justice. I argue these influential users domesticate HAESÒ by drawing on their own education, life experience, and personal identity while upholding the core norms of the influencer industry: authenticity and credibility.

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

Recent calls for a statement of ethics for RHM research claim that a statement is needed in order to have a “place at the table” for collaborative medical research. I argue two problems exist with this call. First, the motive for creating a statement reflects criticism of rhetoric’s epistemic and ethical virtues raised by Dilip Gaonkar and Plato, respectively. Second, ethics statements do not adequately address the range of research practices found in transdisciplines like RHM. Drawing from RHM scholarship and my own experiences, I argue that these criticisms are unfounded and that RHM’s ethical value is found in our analysis and criticism.

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

Between 1842 and 1890, 23 women wrote 33 memoirs about their time spent incarcerated in American insane asylums. While a handful of these memoirs have been studied, there has not been a recognition of how many asylum mem­oirs exist and their significance as a collective body of work. Grounded in an inductive analysis of the collective 33 works, this article begins a process of recovering a mostly forgotten moment in time when former patients took agency over their experience, ethos, and rhetoricity to break down the institutional wall of silence and give the public the first patient-centered memoirs. I argue that these women rhetors did this by foregrounding their own identity as patient and by creating a rhetorical position from which their readers would feel the trauma of asylum life. Both rhetorical moves countered institutionalization’s dehumanizing effects by placing the patient experience at the center of understanding the asy­lum experience.

This pilot study of a mental health call center clinician’s workplace tools, processes, and organizational structures proposes a preliminary theory of “distributed and mediated ethos.” A distributed and mediated ethos refers to how an organization uses various resources—artifacts, technologies, and processes—situated across dis¬parate locations in order to expand and control their identity in the service of extend¬ing their reach and capacity to render essential services. An analysis of a participant clinician’s rhetorical context flowcharts and network pictures shows how an agency’s ethos is mediated through various technologies. Findings suggest that a distributed ethos (1) projects the impression of being “always there”; (2) relies on dexterity across several human and nonhuman actors; and (3) necessitates targeted tasks from branches that extend ethos farther from the organization. This pilot study, thus, provides researchers of rhetoric of health and medicine (RHM) with a new tool for exploring the intricate and complex nature of health at a distance and other complicated 21st century healthcare delivery formats.

Using primary source materials from medical, government, and journalism archives, this study of public medical discourse reveals the role of argumentation in posi­tively shaping public perceptions of traumatized soldiers and locates the contem­porary origins of the trope of “soldier as psychological victim of war”—a perception that continues to inform public policy and medical research. Using Jasinski’s (1998) concepts of interior and exterior constitutive potential to analyze the public writ­ings, interviews, and Congressional testimony of VVAW-affiliated psychiatrists, the study finds that the radical psychiatrists’ interior (directed at veterans) and exte­rior (directed at public and medical institutions) rhetorics were (and arguably remain) mutually effective in creating an identity for veterans to occupy that exculpated them from their involvement in war, while allowing them to garner benefits for their ser­vice. The article concludes with two examples of the “veteran as psychological vic­tim of war” trope as it shapes the contemporary rhetorical ecology of former servicemembers.

A Review of Rhetorical Work in Emergency Medical Services: Communicating in the Unpredictable Workplace Marissa C. McKinley Rhetorical Work in Emergency Medical Services: Communicating in the Unpredictable Workplace. By Elizabeth L. Angeli. New York, NY: Routledge, 2019. 204 pages, $47.95 paper, $23.98 e-book.

In an effort to better understand the historical significance of the “mental illness as motive” narrative, this essay investigates what has been recognized as the first mass shooting in the modern United States—Howard Unruh’s 1949 mass shoot¬ing in Camden, New Jersey. Given that mass shootings were an unprecedented phenomenon, the news media played an important role in explaining the event. As will be shown, many Americans felt uncertain about how mental illness man¬ifested and who was vulnerable. Given the often undisclosed, albeit perceived threat of schizophrenia, the public needed reassurance that there would be some indicator of insanity. Accordingly, the media used evidence of religious fanaticism and unfavorable physical descriptions of Unruh to cast him as separate, outside, or an “other.” Ultimately, the media’s rhetorical choices differentiated Unruh and attempted to make mental illness easier to identify for an audience afraid of its influence.

Drawing on the 2017 Las Vegas Shooting as a potent example of trauma, this article investigates how classifying post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) (APA, 2013) shapes cultural understandings of traumatization and survival in an era of gun violence. “PTSD” reproduces colonizing arrangements of power, as elucidated by an activ¬ity theory analysis of the DSM-5, the global authority on psychiatric diagnoses, alongside both diagnostic protocols for PTSD and PTSD discourse in news cov¬erage of the Las Vegas Shooting. This rhetorical approach to the DSM-5 as a complex system of activity exposes conflicting effects: classifying post-traumatic stress as “mental disorder” qualifies traumatized survivors for medical treatment, while also pathologizing the debilitating, long-term trauma that mass shootings can cause. This potential conflict between alleviating and pathologizing suffering shores up an individual or biomedical model of health, in contrast to a public health model oriented around the health of populations, that may shame survivors and commodify their pain.

A Review of Bounding Biomedicine: Evidence and Rhetoric in the New Science of Alternative Medicine J. Blake Scott Bounding Biomedicine: Evidence and Rhetoric in the New Science of Alternative Medicine. By Colleen Derkatch. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2016. 238 pages. $55 cloth; $10 e-book.