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.

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

Recent research in rhetoric of health and medicine (RHM) has called on scholars to find ways to more adequately attend to patients’ lived and embodied experiences. At the same time, scholarship within and allied to RHM has long worked to address the problems of perspectivalism and relatedly, Cartesian binaries such as mind/body or self/nonself. This article aims to build theory that simultaneously addresses these concerns by examining patients’ experiences with ostomies. This article develops rhetorical enactments as a theoretical frame that enables RHM scholars to explore lived experiences and account for diverse entities that participate in those experiences. The analysis presented focuses on how entities like “self” and “ostomy” are rhetorically enacted within lived experiences and become meaningfully different. Ultimately, this article advocates rhetorical enactments as a productive way to both understand and intervene in patients’ lived experiences.

Searching the Internet for health information is now routine; recommending and receiving medical expertise on social media platforms such as Instagram (IG) during medical treatment remains understudied. After analyzing more than 200 images on IG related to (in)fertility treatment, we employed a directed content analysis. In this manuscript, we investigate self- disclosure related to in vitro fertilization treatment on IG and the types of linguistic (e.g., written affirmations, hashtags) and paralinguistic (e.g., emoji) feedback given in response. We found users on IG received emotional (e.g., expressions of care), informational (e.g., medical and treatment advice), tangible (e.g., gifted medicine and care packages), and belonging (e.g., #ttcsisters) functions of social support in response to self-disclosure (Uchino, 2004). By concluding that social media platforms allow for unique social support exchanges, we offer theoretical and practical implications for scholars, practitioners, and patients interested in social support, supportive communication, and emoji on social media platforms.

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.

On the Focus and Scope page of the journal’s website, we describe RHM as a “multidisciplinary” journal that publishes rhetorical studies, and then go on to reference publishing “interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research” that “can combine rhetorical analysis with any number of otherhumanistic or social scientific methodologies.” We still think, in some ways, that both the journal and field of RHM can be described as multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, and transdisciplinary at the same time; beyond drawing from a number of scholarly areas, for example, our collective research often synthesizes and integrates (in a holistic way) concepts, methods, and findings from these areas, creating new hybrid forms of scholarship that are not fixed within disciplinary boundaries.

This study describes and analyzes a sample of noncommercial web pages that address cancer genetic testing. These “gateway documents,” which were returned in an initial Internet search for information, may serve as the only texts that peo­ple read when deciding whether to pursue genetic testing. Deliberative rhetorical theory elaborated into dimensions of embodied knowledge and scientific knowl­edge was mapped onto problematic integration theory to create a framework for investigating the documents. Analysis reveals the contingent nature of evaluating probability in genetic testing and the intrinsic need to examine the rhetorical con­struction of gateway documents as multidimensional communication events in which disadvantages and benefits shift—and sometimes transpose—according to the embodied knowledge of each person. Benefits and disadvantages of genetic test­ing become topoi that healthcare providers should consider carefully to improve the decision-making information offered to people who are searching for online resources.

Booher, Amanda K., & Jung, Julie. (Eds.) (2018). Feminist rhetori­cal science studies: Human bodies, posthumanist worlds. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press. pp. 274. Paperback $45.00.Yergeau, Melanie. (2017). Authoring autism: On rhetoric and neuro­logical queerness. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. pp. 312. Cloth $104.95, Paperback $27.95.Koerber, Amy. (2018). From hysteria to hormones: A rhetorical history. University Park: Penn State University Press. pp. 264. Cloth $99.95, Paperback $34.95.

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.

Obituaries are becoming an increasingly popular medium that people who have lost friends and relatives to opioid overdose are using to speak out. Many sources refer to these as addiction obituaries. In this essay, we present a generic rhetorical analysis of 73 addiction-relatedobituaries in order to question and explore this phenomenon as a potential emerging genre of rhetoric. In doing so, we argue that addiction obituaries constitute a hybrid rhetorical genre intertwining the conventions of an obituary with a public service announcement, which we call a public service death announcement, or PSDA. This symbolic form fulfills many social functions necessitated by the unique sociocultural circumstances brought forth by the opioid crisis. However, it also reveals limitations of conceiving of addiction at the level of individual faces.

Phase 1 cancer clinical trial consultations are fraught with ethical and rhetorical issues. Phase 1 trials are designed to test the toxicity, and not the efficacy, of therapeutic agents. Fewer than 5% of patients benefit from their participation in a Phase 1 trial, and over 75% of experimental drugs do not become approved cancer medicines. Bioethicists have long debated the ethics of recruitment consultations for Phase 1 trials solely in terms of the need for patients to make a rational decision based upon enough information to avoid what are called therapeutic misconceptions and/or unrealistic optimism as motivations to participate in Phase 1 trials. We argue here, however, that the ethical challenges in Phase 1 consultations go beyond providing information about the (unknown) risks and (unanticipated) benefits of a Phase 1 clinical trial. In this article, we present a rhetorically oriented case study of a Phase 1 consultation, followed by a rhetorically informed critique of the rationality of bioethics. We use Lauren Berlant’s (2011) concept of “cruel optimism” to develop a more complete account of the rhetorical and ethical nexus of patient motivations in Phase 1 consultations by creating a discursive space to explore the concerns, hopes, and motivations of cancer patients considering participation in the earliest phase of clinical research in cancer medicine. The goal of our study is to propose a framework aimed at achieving Lisa Keränen’s (2007) concept of relational integrity applied to Phase 1 consultations.

This essay takes the recent popularity of medical doctors’ narrative writings about the dying process as its cultural exigence, analyzing these alongside an earlier wave of such writings as epideictic rhetorics that function to reshape cultural values surrounding the “good death” by reconstituting our notions of virtuous dying conduct. Although the texts analyzed have many admirable and comforting qualities, encouraging us to face death with realism and assuring us that there are aspects of the way we die which are within our control, the virtues and modes of conduct they promote and exalt around a controlled death are available only to the privileged subject.

This essay assumes that the design and use of surveys is a fundamentally rhetorical act. It provides suggestions for employing and designing health-related surveys intended for research participants who might be characterized as inhabiting one or more precarious positionalities. We use “precarious positionality” to signal when research participants self-identify as one or more of the following: a racial and/or linguistic minority, economically disadvantaged, disabled, former or current drug user, undocumented, un(der)educated, oppressed, sexualized, disenfranchised, criminalized,and/or colonized. Drawing on the research team’s experiences with piloting what we hope will eventually become a nationwide survey, the essay describes how to avoid several survey-designpitfalls; it also makes recommendations for how to improve survey-based health research that enrolls participants who inhabit one or more precarious positionalities. Our recommendations attend to rhetorical complexities related to survey ethics, inclusion criteria, privacy, stigmatized and misleading language, variations in discursive repertoires, accessibility, and liability.

editors intro

In this article, we argue that Down syndrome (DS) advocates seeking to intervene in medical exigences are poorly positioned by their audiences of patients and physicians. To combat this problem, we find that some advocates, specifically mothers of children with DS, recuperate their ethos through two primary rhetorical strategies: shaping contexts and developing invitational ethos. Advocates are able to more freely draw from maternal authority when they shape the contexts of their messages, creating new venues and limiting their audiences. On the other hand, advocates can also appease medical authority by developing an invitational ethos in which they create the conditions for their own participation and offer their own perspectives. Through the use of these two strategies, advocates are able to claim their positions as mothers, while still cultivating positive ethos.

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.

In April 2017, Minnesota experienced the state’s largest measles outbreak since 1990. The outbreak primarily affected Somali children and was attributed to declining vaccination rates in Minnesota’s Somali population, specifically. Examining empirical data from ethnographic interviews with Somali parents who experienced the outbreak, this article identifies four themes that shaped participants’ vaccination decision-making: 1) an experience-informed belief in vaccine effectiveness, 2) concerns about non-inclusive clinical research, 3) belief in personalized, flexible immunity, and 4) experiences of structural vulnerability. Findings show that race and ethnicity, migration history, and structural precarity in resettlement influence Somali parents’ vaccination decisions and should inform existing explanations for vaccine hesitancy and models for responsive public health outreach. Participants’ practices of vaccine hesitancy are often refusals: constrained and embodied acts of resistance and generative openings to collaboratively re-envision healthcare relationships and communication. Refusals can redirect public health efforts from vaccine compliance toward institutional change and resource redistribution as means of disease prevention. This possibility has yet to be fully explored, and this article uses rhetorical publics theory to study medical refusal as a public participation strategy.

Recent work in rhetoric of science, technology, health, and medicine argues for a shift away from critique, even as some health communication scholars call for critical engagement with the situated, ideological nature of scientific claims supporting public health messages. We suggest that critique of scientific claims remains important to rhetoricians of health and medicine, but that such critique must go further in examining interactions between science, values, and public health policy. We offer an adapted version of stasis theory as a framework for pursuing this end. Using the U.S. public health nutrition policy Dietary Guidelines for Americans as a case study, we engage this framework to explore how science-based nutrition policy provides a discursive lens that influences how subsequent scientific evidence is produced, interpreted, and employed.

This persuasion brief suggests that the rhetorical concepts of techne and rhetorical work facilitate the creation of public health crisis communication. To illustrate this claim, we present findings from a case study with the Johns Hopkins Medicine Ebola Crisis Communications Team, a transdisciplinary group that collaborated with Centers for Disease Control and Prevention during the 2014 Ebola crisis. The team created multimodal documentation to support healthcare providers as they prepared to treat patients and crafted communication to alleviate the fear among health workers and the public caused by the threat of Ebola. Ultimately, we frame public health crisis communication as a rhetorical endeavor guided by a focus on failure, situated expertise, and techne. This focus pushes specialists to tend to the processes involved in creating a response, and it highlights how gut feelings factor into the process of designing and implementing a public health crisis intervention.

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.

Patient-OBGYN (obstetrics and gynecology) communication about contraception and reproduction can be fraught with ideological pressures, cultural assumptions, and emotion-based claims and concerns. Specifically, the topic of elective sterilization for women often invokes preconceived notions of femininity and mothering. Based on medical pamphlets and online discussion forums, our analysis reveals how gendered discrepancies exist in medical information about elective sterilization. This persuasion brief aims to invite OBGYNs to understand how cultural and traditional views of gender inform medical decisions and oppress women’s reproductive autonomy. It offers suggestions for OBGYNs, women seeking sterilization, and scholars in the rhetoric of health and medicine.

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.

Analyzing media discourse around Chris Christie’s fatness and fitness for the presidency, this essay examines how stigma constrains the rhetorical resources of individuals who transgress norms of bodies, health, and ability. To do so, I extend two concepts in the rhetoric of health and medicine: rhetorical disability (challenges to ethos precipitated by stigma) and recuperative ethos (Molloy, 2015) (efforts to rebuild ethos in light of rhetorical disability). I make two interrelated claims: 1) fat stigma is rhetorically disabling in the cultural logics of the obesity epidemic, and 2) since fat stigma in this context operates as a rhetorical disability, Christie seeks to recuperate his ethos by presenting himself as a viable leader. While scholars have theorized that “rhetorical disability” is incited by stigma around mental disability (Price, 2011; Johnson, 2010; Prendergast, 2001), I show how fat stigma similarly produces a disabling rhetorical effect: as Christie works to recuperate ethos, fat is taken up as an argument about health, morality, and individual failure.

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

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.

Drawing on our experiences with qualitative research involving health and medical topics to which we have a personal connection, this dialogue asks scholars in RHM to consider key methodological issues in embodied research by exploring: the choice to take up inquiries with which we have personal connections; the ethics of representation within these projects; and determining if, how, when, and to what degree we should reveal these connections in the research write-ups themselves. Our conversation is characterized by a “heuristic orientation”—defined as intuitive, creative, and generative. We conclude by offering a heuristic tool for researchers to use as they make crucial decisions in embodied research in 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.

When considering the material ecologies of the human body, we must consider the bodies within—at least five hundred known species of microbes. We propose the term gut rhetorics to highlight how our guts have become an environment to which we are exposed: a biologically active actant contributing to the physiology and psychology—the rhetorical capacities—of the human body. Gut rhetorics incorporate—bring into the body and, importantly, into the body of rhetoric—the hungry horde within human bodies. First, we trace one probiotic formulation across three scientific studies to show how bodies, affects, and microbes are being “calibrated” at the level of experiment. Second, we stress skilled probiotic experimentation and encourage scholars to play amid environments, give attention to embodiment, and pursue phenomenological inquiry (Gruber, 2018; Melonçon, 2018). Gut rhetorics consider bodies, affects, and microbiota as entangled metabolic intra-actions that affect how the world appears to the body and the body to the world.

Public health advocates often encounter the arduous rhetorical situation of championing issues assumed to be personal. One such rhetorical situation can be observed in pro-caregiving advocacy rhetoric; organizations promoting public policy attention for unpaid family caregivers. This essay argues that pro-caregiving advocates invite public action by persuasively advancing personal and public problems that impact caregivers, care-receivers, taxpayers, and businesses; however, in their policy statements, advocates undo the likelihood of public action by creating a partial solution that emphasizes the preferred location of home care and de-emphasizes the ways in which the financial and health-related caregiver problems get solved. The essay concludes with rhetorical lessons that highlight the practical applicability of argumentation methodology for scholars and practitioners of public health advocacy. In doing so, this essay offers practical tools to evaluate and reposition the efforts of health advocates moving an issue from personal to public.

Scholars have criticized the rhetoric of compliance for decades. For example, they have offered a more nuanced account of why patients are “noncompliant,” recasting noncompliance itself as rational behavior. While these insights made important strides toward the larger goal of disrupting power dynamics within medical encounters, and while they yielded new rhetorical inventions such as adherence and concordance, these new terms retained many of compliance’s problematic features. Building on the work of rhetoricians of health and medicine and other scholars, we cast compliance’s persistence as a symptom of shortcomings in the dominant medical model and its tendency to discipline individual patients instead of work with communities to facilitate health. We argue that this model is being challenged in especially dramatic ways with the increased focus on populations and communities. Drawing on the work of Michel Foucault to understand how to navigate problems associated with the disciplinary approach, the authors argue not just for a better understanding of the causes of noncompliance, but for a post-compliance conception of medicine. Among other things, such a view of medicine will require new rhetorical structures that can better support the aims of population health and community-based medicine.

Should, and could, the rhetoric of health and medicine (RHM) develop a professional disciplinary code of ethics? In this commentary, I argue that RHM has special need for a code of ethics, but that we encounter unique barriers to codification. These barriers arise not because we are not ethical, but because we are distinctively ethical. By analyzing the rhetoric of the professional disciplinary code of ethics as a genre, it becomes evident that codes have the potential to restrict a humanities field’s ethical discourse to the domain of academic research and to limit its participation in the domains of health and medicine. Subsequently, I levy that certain generic conventions of the code of ethics do not adequately meet our needs as a health humanities field. I raise, instead, the possibility of an alternative statement of ethics that better mediates the health and humanities divide. Towards the feasibility of this prospect, I begin to theorize the notion of a “rhetorical ethics”: a conceptualization of RHM as a distinctive and legitimate approach to ethical discourse in health and medicine.

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.

Public discourse about health and illness is often considered to lack the nuances and complexities offered in academic treatments of similar subjects. Drawing on the author’s collaborative work with fashion photographer/advocacy artist David Jay, the author calls on RHM scholars to consider the richness of this and similar projects for expanding notions of scholarship in the field. RHM scholars’ expertise in shaping messages about a continuum of health and medicine subjects can influence the perceptions of both academic and public stakeholders on these conversations.

In this persuasion brief I suggest how rhetorical-historical insights into the scientific and medical discourses of female hormones are relevant to current organizational and institutional diversity initiatives, especially those that aim to increase the number of women in leadership positions. Many of the examples I cite in the essay make specific reference to hormones, and as I argue, hormones often serve an enthymematic function in these expert arguments, both past and present. More specifically, I argue, discourses about hormones allow people who do not possess any scientific expertise to make authoritative-sounding claims that resonate with popular beliefs about women’s bodies and brains. Uncovering these historical tendencies in scientific and medical discourse offers new perspectives on the obstacles that women face in today’s workplaces. In this persuasion brief I aim to discuss these perspectives in ways that make the findings of rhetorical-historical research relevant to the many different stakeholders, leaders, and policymakers who are currently working to help women rise to leadership positions in many different fields.

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.

Recent research in rhetoric of health and medicine (RHM) has worked to evaluate the effectiveness of patient inclusion initiatives in health policy decision-making. Extending this line of research, this article evaluates the extent to which the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) patient and consumer representative programs meaningfully engage patient experiences. In so doing, this study provides directed and summative content analyses of pharmaceuticals policy deliberation at 163 FDA drug advisory committee meetings. The results indicate that the current implementation of the patient and consumer representative programs do not adequately ensure that patient experiences are being included as a part of advisory committee deliberation or subsequent pharmaceuticals policy. Additionally, the results presented support the growing concern that attempts to include patient perspectives in health policy may actually further marginalize patient populations.

Over the previous two decades, rhetoricians came to grips with the transition of genetics to genomics by employing rigorous analyses of public discourse, analysis characterized by respect for diverse audiences, attention to precisely what is said, and the historicity of texts. In so doing, they provided helpful models for addressing a new wave of genomics that may threaten to change “genomic medicine” from the curing of disease into the remaking of human beings and the earth’s biosphere. Their work can be read as supporting and illustrating an integrative model of biological and discursive codes as opposed to the hierarchization of mind over body, or the reverse. The inauguration of Rhetoric of Health & Medicine creates a valuable locus for building upon such work, ready to address the new wave of genomics and the on-going challenge of being social creatures who remake ourselves and others.

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.

Through conversations with medical interpreters who work in Grand Rapids, Michigan, this dialogue piece illustrates multiple ways that medical interpretation can be further considered as a method and practice within the rhetoric of health and medicine (RHM). By sharing specific methodological frameworks for researching medical interpretation, the authors introduce possibilities for how RHM research can continue to engage in work that extends beyond English-dominant communication.

This commentary traces, groups, and characterizes the significant body of work done in rhetoric and writing studies on mental health(care) issues from when such work first began to appear in print in the mid-1980s up until July 2017 when the article was completed and submitted to RHM for publication in its inaugural issue.

Vaccinations are a notoriously difficult topic to discuss with patients, and efforts to persuade those who are most hesitant often fail. In this persuasion brief, common vaccination concerns and skepticisms are reexamined through the perspectives offered by rhetorical studies. This analysis demonstrates why current counter-arguments to vaccine skepticisms often fall short. As an alternative, this article encourages practitioners to consider how the material qualities of vaccinations contribute to their instability and make them difficult for patients to accept. This perspective suggests relationship-building and coalition-building as routes for improving doctor-patient communication about vaccines.

We examined medico-legal collaboration regarding dangerous sex offenders where state legislators have adopted statutes that determine the criteria for commitment to and discharge from civil commitment programs. The application of these statutes relies on medical diagnoses of pathologies such as paraphilia, anti-social personality disorder, and pedophilia along with prognoses for cure or recidivism. In our study, we examined court opinions from commitment hearings and observed a trial in federal court on the constitutionality of these commitments. We found that one result of this medico-legal collaboration is the marginalization or othering of sex offenders by essentializing, dividing, shaming, and impeaching them. We also found that this group attempted to resist othering by rhetorical strategies such as providing evidence of change in character, distinction within the othered group, and proof of internal controls over unacceptable impulses. Finally, we discovered that such othering relies heavily on medical expertise, even though some medical practitioners may disagree with, or be hesitant in, their roles in this medico-legal collaboration.

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.