Rural librarians are intermediaries between individuals and our health system. Librarians direct their patrons to health resources, assist with online tasks such as insurance enrollment, lend health equipment, and more. And yet, rural libraries and librarians are largely absent from rhetoric of health and medicine (RHM) scholarship. Drawing from interviews with 11 rural librarians in nine states, we discovered that librarians leverage two kairotic openings for health communication: response and invitation. They succeed via three kairotic strategies: appropriateness, propriety, and opportunity. Librarians serving rural areas eschew simplistic ideographs around digital access and urge us to consider the meaning of mental health in rural America. Librarians are powerful intermediaries because they build trust through repeated conversations and a willingness to help patrons solve their problems. Our health system should recognize, celebrate, and utilize the rural library system to better serve patients.

This essay presents a rhetorical analysis of how the concept of stigma has functioned in American psychiatric discourse by tracing the concept across nearly two centuries of publications issued by the American Psychiatric Association (APA). Specifically, I analyze how the concept of stigma circulates in discourses that seek to (re)establish psychiatry as a moral and scientific enterprise by managing discontinuities that potentially threaten this desired professional status. These discourses perpetually reconstitute psychiatry’s institutional identity through processes of emplacement, or recurrent spatiotemporal figurations that generate a sense of the present as placed in time. My analysis identifies three spatiotemporal figurations, or chronotopes, that persistently cluster around the concept of stigma as it circulates in psychiatric discourse: emergence, approach, and elevation. These chronotopes establish and maintain psychiatry’s professional identity by recursively (re)orienting the present against stigma, and toward an imminent future characterized by the fulfillment of psychiatry’s scientific and humanitarian mission.

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.