This dialogue offers a transnational perspective on the emergence of public health officials (PHOs) as celebrities during the acute phase of the COVID-19 pandemic. Drawing on scholarship on public health rhetorics (e.g., Keränen, 2014; Malkowski & Melonçon, 2019) and on our experiences of living through the ongoing pandemic as well as observing its effects in Australia, Canada, China, and the United States, we focused our discussion on our local contexts; key public health celebrities who emerged in those contexts; changes in public reaction to those figures over time; and why the celebrification of public health figures is of interest to scholars in rhetoric of health and medicine. We close by reflecting on how our transnational discussion of public health celebrities has reshaped our understanding of celebrification in health and outline key areas of future collaboration and inquiry.

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.

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.

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.

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.