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

Abstract: This article develops “menstrual methodologies” for ungendering menstruation and attending to the chronic pain and dysphoria present in menstrual embodiment. Specifically, it unfolds from the experiences of a nonbinary person with undiagnosed endometriosis through developing a series of menstrual methodologies, including ungendering menstruation; thinking with pain through crip time, crankiness, and autoethnography; and a justice-based approach to menstruation; followed by an application of these methodologies to a recent case study. Following on an autobiographical prelude, I begin with an introduction to menstrual methodologies and next outline each one. Menstrual methodologies, I argue, provide a toolkit not only for those who study menstruation and menstruators but for researchers across disciplines who are interested in questions of gender, embodiment, pain, medical science, justice, and disability.

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.

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.

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.

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.