Overall, vaccine acceptance appears to be high. But vaccine hesitancy persists nonetheless. This article draws on moral foundations theory (MFT) to rhetorically explore possibilities of storytelling within the genre of the vaccine anecdote, a form of discourse common to vaccine-skeptical discourses. Informed by social scientific accounts of the moral foundations associated with high vaccine hesitancy, I analyze three examples of pro-vaccine anecdotes—an anecdote of injury, an anecdote of conversion, and an anecdote of positive outcome—to explore strategies of personal storytelling toward the values of vaccine-hesitant publics. From the analysis, I describe three specific modes of storytelling (haunting, continuing, and intuiting) while weighing their varying promise for aligning vaccine-supportive anecdotes with mild or more extreme levels of vaccine hesitancy.

The End of Genre: Curations and Experiments in Intentional Discourses, Brenton Faber. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave MacMillan, 2022. 244 pages, $99 eBook, $129 softcover; $129 hardcover. Publisher webpage: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-08747-9

Reporting guidelines have emerged in recent years as a critical site of deliberation and intervention for stakeholders in the biomedical community. These texts have historically been used to formulate standards for quality reporting and bring consistency to processes of writing and publication; they also operate as a space in which practitioners promote values, define expectations, and coordinate action in line with established standards and practices in the field. Drawing on scholarship in rhetoric and genre studies, this article examines how reporting guidelines contribute to the standardization of writing and publishing activity in biomedicine, functioning both as semi-procedural documents that take part in the “genre-ing” of published research and as public displays of and arguments for accountability that can be used to regulate the work of knowledge making over time. I conclude by discussing how rhetoricians might use reporting guidelines as a strategic locus for conceptualizing and potentially shaping research and writing activity in different areas of health and medicine.

This study aims to examine online contraception texts as a way to interrogate the intersections of identity, inclusivity, and access in contraception and reproductive health discourses. At the center of this project is the understanding that, while many contraceptive technologies are designed for and marketed towards "women" for the sole use of preventing pregnancy, the actual users of contraception and their purposes for its use are diverse and involve considerations of sexuality, gender identity, socioeconomic status, ability, cultural and religious norms, and access to healthcare. By examining the genre of contraception texts through systematized coding and rhetorical analysis, this study examines how the constitutive genre features of these texts do and do not recognize the diversity of users, with a particular focus on users in the trans community.

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.

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.

This article applies the lens of genre to the social media advocacy of three patient-activists—self-identified “zebras” whose rarely diagnosed conditions are frequently comorbid—who, through performing consistent genre moves, and using the capabilities of social networking to translate personal experiences into public discourse, amplify visibility, and normalize their voices as collective advocacy. Ultimately, through networked communication, these patient-activists perform emergent connections between their conditions outside of the traditional legitimization networks of biomedicine with the aim of gaining legitimacy in public and clinical settings.

This past decade, the healthcare industry has undergone a transformation with where, how, and why writing happens. For example, what the health and medical professions conceive of as “documentation” or “charting” is writing, even though practitioners call it by another name. Additionally, most writing in healthcare settings is now also multimodal, incorporating textual, digital, visual, and aural content. This essay focuses on the patient decision aid as pedagogical tool that embraces the technological and multimodal changes in health and medicine. Patient decision aids can be understood as a multimodal tool guiding shared decision-making practices. As a genre, the decision aid prompts students to engage in a series of writing modalities – visuals, narrative, texts – as well as the application of user experience and design. Finally, the decision aid as an assignment offers explicit connections between humanities-based students and broader healthcare industries.

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

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

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.

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.