Survivor’s guilt haunts countless veterans, yet little research examines how veterans rhetorically process this experience. This study analyzes poetry from post-9/11 veterans to identify a distinct rhetorical mode we term reparative ethos.  While existing Mental Health Rhetoric Research (MHRR) has identified and extensively explored recuperative ethos—strategies used to restore credibility in the face of externally imposed stigma—we propose that some veterans may also engage in what we call reparative ethos. Unlike recuperative ethos, which addresses externally imposed stigma through appeals to living audiences, reparative ethos aims to make amends to internalized representations of lost comrades. Drawing on Melanie Klein’s object relations theory and MHRR, we analyze poems from Warrior Writers anthologies that explicitly address survivor’s guilt. Our analysis reveals that veterans engage in narrative acts of reparation directed toward deceased others, addressing both the loss of external relationships and threats to internalized military ethos. This research extends MHRR by demonstrating how trauma can generate inward-facing rhetorical strategies focused on healing rather than persuasion, offering new frameworks for understanding veteran mental healthcare and creative expression.

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.

We draw on William L. Benoit’s image repair theory to examine the case of Jesse Gelsinger, who died during a clinical trial testing the safety of a highly anticipated gene therapy treatment. We argue the primary biomedical researcher blamed for Gelsinger’s death used image repair strategies to frame his controversial research as a regrettable but important moment in the larger pursuit of frontier science in which he claimed to have acted humanely. We explain how health and medical professionals apologizing for biomedical tragedies risk demeaning the public they already harmed. Our study tries to account for image repair’s essential but contradictory role in dangerous frontier biomedicine, and we draw novel connections between image repair strategies and the rhetorical concepts of synecdoche and metonymy.

This article breaks from the traditional structure of social science research reports to offer an alternative approach to sharing findings by willfully wading through the methodological mess of research. By narratively reporting results from a site-based study of an acute care simulation, I treat disclosure of my analytical journey as a productive method for introducing and unpacking two key constructs that emerged from my research: “metarhetorical attunement” and “kairotic hinges”; constructs that implicate and seek to develop our critical, rhetorical understandings of time, place, and (in)action. Furthermore,  not only do I describe how these constructs operate within a simulation setting, but I model my personal use of them as a researcher participating in a community of practice.

While parents have long turned to experts of various kinds for childrearing advice, books like Emily Oster’s Cribsheet suggest that parents can empower themselves by using research on child development to inform their parenting decisions. The online community r/ScienceBasedParenting was designed as a “safe space” for this kind of parental labor, allowing users to request evidence-based advice without the threat of misinformation that often plagues online parenting spaces. This article analyzes how users of this community establish a boundary between science and nonscience, establishing science as an amorphous shared value rather than a set of processes or standards. The community establishes personal feelings and experiences as unscientific and implicitly inferior to “science,” vaguely construed, and user conversations indicate the struggles associated with this construction. The community’s internal rhetoric illustrates that there are limits to the reassurance and empowerment that evidence-based parenting can provide.

This paper investigates the multi-faceted and ambiguous metaphorical connotations of “risk” terminology in COVID-19 updates delivered by Canadian public health officers (PHOs) during the first year of the pandemic. Our study reveals diverse and conflicting configurations of risk as both a manageable and unmanageable entity, a personal possession and an external location, an attribute of people and of spaces and activities, and a spectrum of degrees that (dis)identified those at lower and higher levels of risk. We argue that this situated tangle of metaphorical meanings contributed to a broader Canadian politics of neoliberal-communitarian health governance which was premised simultaneously on the active citizen’s individual responsibility to manage risk for self and others and on the vulnerabilization of citizens designated “most at risk.” For the RHM field, our study suggests new ways of exploring the meanings and implications of “risk” language within diverse contexts of health and medical communication.

Rhetoric about bodies, health, and medicine is conceived at the intersection of multiple discursive systems and social domains. I contend that religion remains an underexplored (and sometimes misrepresented) realm in the rhetoric of health and medicine (RHM)—a gap this article seeks to address. Here, I present my research on the importance of Protestantism in the invention of the premature infant as a medical figure in the United States. I show that early discourse about premature birth is shot through with Protestant rhetoric and beliefs, and I propose the term “theo-moral physiology” for the religiously informed medical orientation popularized in late 19th century medical literature about premature babies. Ultimately, I challenge RHM scholars to resist the tendency to treat the rise of American biomedicine as a fundamentally secular project by attending to the ways modern medicine has evolved in tandem with contemporary religion.

This article draws on Louis Althusser’s theory of interpellation to examine the ideology behind the language and images of a web-based video Johnson & Johnson created in 2020. The video promoted the company’s annual “Nurses Innovate QuickFire Challenge”—a grant competition for nurses’ innovations. In our analysis, we found that the video created four main discourses of care: nurses as innovators, technologies as care, nurses as heroic, ministering angels, and Johnson & Johnson as an empowerer of nurses. Building on the positive, but contested, identity of nurses as heroes during the pandemic, Johnson & Johnson’s video connected heroism with technological innovation, enacting a problematic vision of care and nursing identity that figures technological innovation as not only a responsibility but a moral obligation of nurses. Through their sponsorship of research and design work with these nurse heroes and innovators, Johnson & Johnson also bolstered its own corporate identity as a caring supporter and empowerer of nurses.

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.

Building on mental health rhetoric research (MHRR), I explore how legal advocates in non-profit organizations guide survivors of domestic abuse in obtaining orders for protection (OFPs). State statutes not only dictate what a petition for an OFP must contain, but these statutes and resulting documents also reflect cultural and structural biases about domestic abuse. Through rhetorical analysis of state statutes and personal interviews with legal advocates in this inductive and qualitative study, I discovered that these advocates engage in subversive rhetorical intervention, what the advocates call “crafty” intervention. Such intervention is designed to meet the requirements of state statutes for an OFP and also provide a way for survivors to tell their stories in their own way. This intervention sets the stage for helping survivors heal from the trauma of domestic abuse, convincing judges that survivors need OFPs to stay safe, and demonstrating to state legislators that domestic abuse statutes may be too restrictive.

This essay examines how medical rhetorics helped justify the recent torrent of anti-trans legislation. Beginning with the “legitimacy wars” between psychiatry and psychology, I trace how competing disciplines established their own expertise by denying trans patients’ agency and self-knowledge. After identifying the “trans trickster” trope that emerges from these rhetorics, I trace how the trans trickster haunts arguments used to ban gender-affirming health care and sports participation for trans youth. I draw from sociologist Ian Hacking’s “looping effects” to explain how medical logics affect public perception and how those understandings loop back into medical research. The binary, linear models of gender transition established by trans medicine helped justify cisnormative policies around transgender identity, which in turn restricted further scientific inquiry such that more imaginative gender formations remain illegible. To conclude, I argue that medical paradigms work in relation with trans imagination would expand scientific explorations of human diversity, and that those understandings too could loop through public policy and perception.

Women of color are more likely to experience infertility compared to white women. Despite this likelihood, infertility continues to be associated with whiteness. This study examines the historical and modern influences of the hyperfertility narrative, a pervasive master narrative linking race and reproduction. Studying Instagram posts about infertility and race, McCann argues that women of color have had to fight for their very inclusion within infertility identities, illustrating the continued rhetorical salience that dominant narratives of race and reproductive enforce within support-seeking environments like Instagram. Specifically, this study demonstrates how WOCr rhetors counter hyperfertility by co-constructingnew counternarratives that frame experiences of infertility through experiences with race and racism. These counternarratives involve three empowerment strategies: witnessing, visual counterstorying, and attribution. By studying how marginalized rhetors counter hyperfertility narratives, the study illustrates a kind of invitational knowledge-building that occurs within histories of race and reproduction. Overall, this work pushes scholars and practitioners in reproductive care to acknowledge how racial identities, and perhaps personhood itself, is de/valued around and through reproductive abilities.

Since successful healthcare relies heavily on a practitioner’s ability to empathize with the patient, the allied health professions—like nursing and speech therapy—have long considered the possibilities and limitations of a pedagogical practice that centers empathy. In this essay, we analyze two such pedagogies: role playing with simulated patients in nursing and story sharing in a multimodal memoir group with aphasic clients in communicative sciences and disorders (CSD). Comparing theories of empathy in these fields as well as interviews with the future nurses and speech therapists participating in these experiences, we show how students engage in what we call “empathy-in-action” through both reflection and enactment and what rhetorical scholarship can gain from attending to these practices. Ultimately, we argue that putting rhetoric, nursing, and CSD in conversation deepens each field’s understanding of how empathy can be taught and learned.

In this essay I bring together two spaces—street needle exchange and the university classroom—to explore harm reduction as an epistemological model that can be adapted pedagogically in our rhetoric, communications, and composition classes. I first identify capitalism in the classroom as an insistence on mastery and the relentless call to know, acquire, and achieve. I then offer harm reduction, a public health practice that rejects these iterations of capitalism, to instead ask how we might meet students where they are and how we might forego the rewards of telos for the discomfort of process and mess. I’ll argue in this piece that reducing the harms of capitalist-based writing and knowledge requires considered attention to the ways we are lured toward production (what we might even call “deliverables”). I explore the epistemological nodes of harm reduction—its emphasis on temporality and its privileging of process—as methods for teaching writing, rhetoric, and communications while also offering a pedagogical case study along the way.

This short article offers examples of how rhetoricians of health and medicine (RHM) can employ user experience (UX) design principles and practices to enhance student learning in courses that focus on scientific, health, and/or medical communication. More specifically, we propose a participatory health communication pedagogy that can help RHM educators leverage UX principles to meaningfully incorporate students’ experiences into the classroom as both content creators and content users. We argue that by framing students as both creators and users, RHM educators can enact classroom practices and approaches that more fully account for diversity and inclusivity, a process that better accounts for “racism and other forms of injustice [that] permeate health and medicine” (Scott, Melonçon & Molloy, 2020, p.vii). Drawing from two RHM courses as case studies, we demonstrate how a participatory health communication pedagogy can help educators become innovative, UX practitioners who center students’ learning experiences as they design content for health and medical contexts.

Extensive evidence demonstrates that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s multimedia anti-smoking campaign, Tips from Former Smokers, is an effective public health measure. In this essay, I explain the rhetorical appeals utilized in the campaign that contribute to its resonance, arguing that the campaign invokes corporeal anxiety, an emotion that emerges from societal aversion to disability. These appeals to corporeal anxiety operate as enthymemes by relying upon an unstated premise: that disability is negative and ought to be avoided to preserve one’s normalcy. This analysis treats the campaign messages as a form of bodily rhetoric and visual argument, arguing that the campaign deters smoking through graphic bodily imagery and narratives of lost normalcy that conceptualize disability as tragedy or deficit. I conclude that the success of the campaign comes at the expense of perpetuating stigma against people with disabilities.

According to a December 21, 2018, Michigan Attorney General report, at least 105 Michigan State University employees, between 1997 and 2015, had received complaints from women about Dr. Larry Nassar’s inappropriate touching during medical treatment. In 2014, one of these complaints was finally reported to MSU’s Title IX office, triggering an investigation that led to a report that concluded Dr. Larry Nassar’s methods of treatment were “medically appropriate” and cleared him of any wrongdoing. Rhetorical analysis of this report exposes how Nassar benefitted from a rhetorical infrastructure that was designed to offer him institutional protection as an expert in medical techniques that require extensive touching of patients. Such analysis also exposes the specific discursive practices that sustain the rhetorical infrastructures that enable this institutional protection.

Our article uses case studies of two civilian emergency response mHealth apps—PulsePoint and OD Help—to theorize the ways the mobile mapping functionality embedded in these tools, which is integrated with the Google Maps platform, enables yet also constrains users’ agential practices. Using an interface rhetoric approach, we unpack assumptions related to the embodied contexts of use facilitated by this functionality within the unique scenario of civilian emergency response. We argue that interactions between and among humans and these apps’ mapping interfaces involve complex, negotiated, contextually situated enactments, which align with a posthumanist perspective toward agency. At the same time, these interactions may also inadvertently amplify the precarity of vulnerable groups. Better understanding the ways that mobile mapping technologies shape agential enactments, particularly in ways that affect precarious and dispossessed populations, has important implications for the design of mHealth technologies—and the users who rely on them—moving forward.

On March 10, 2019, 60 Minutes reported the development of a potentially life-altering gene therapy for Sickle Cell Disease (SCD). Despite this therapy’s potential for cure, SCD community members’ reactions ranged from skepticism to fear due to the use of deactivated HIV as a vector for transporting the corrected gene into stem cells, thus repairing the faulty gene in SCD. Using a mental models framework, we analyze how 60 Minutes attempted to explain this research and how audiences reacted on social media. Specifically, we show how 60 Minutes’ treatment of given versus new information, as well as the journalists’ failure to account for the specific audiences with the most at stake, led to misunderstandings that contributed to ongoing fear and mistrust of the scientific community. We conclude with recommendations for how journalists should approach accommodating science when that science has particular impacts on minoritized and marginalized groups.

This essay provides an overview of my experiences teaching Rhetoric of Health and Medicine (RHM) courses with an explicit health justice focus. I ground a discussion of pedagogical possibility by reflecting on my emerging course design, which centers reproductive justice—one example of a justice-oriented framework—as a site of learning and inquiry. In describing my course development and delivery, I suggest that a health justice approach to RHM instruction can be timely, contextually relevant, and challenging. Throughout the essay, I offer specific examples for the purposes of replication or adaptation for differently justice-oriented RHM teaching applications.

This article describes an experimental, interdisciplinary course on the immune system that was co-taught by a humanist and a scientist, and that (inadvertently) coincided with the start of the COVID-19 crisis in the United States. We propose the term “codisciplinary code-switching” to capture the pedagogical strategy we developed in designing the course and adapting it over the semester to grapple with current events. We focus, in particular, on how this approach helped our students navigate the entanglement of science and society in the shifting, uncertain world of the pandemic. Although these were peculiar circumstances, codisciplinary code-switching has broader possibilities and points to alternative ways of integrating the humanities and sciences in medical education that respects both disciplines as rigorous tools for reading bodies, texts, and contexts.

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.

Abduction, a mode of reasoning identified by Charles Sanders Peirce, informs theories of clinical decision-­making, but its existing applications to the medical sciences have remained narrow. Building from existing research in the context of patient noncompliance and clinical inertia, this paper advocates a broader understanding of abductive reasoning rooted within the nature of language itself. An example of such a reading of abduction is the theory of triadic communication articulated by American doctor-­turned-­novelist Walker Percy. Percy’s scholarship offers an impetus to examine noncompliance, inertia, and other loci of uncertainty as opportunities for learning, growth, and development of RHM perspectives.

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.

We argue that by using existing data and sharing research in a databank, RHM scholars can practice a research habit that conserves and optimizes intellectual and institutional resources. When possible, by using existing datasets, scholars avoid data waste, that is ignoring or bypassing existing data. The data distinctions that we call attention to—derived, compiled, and designed—account for various ethical and rhetorical concerns regarding privacy and confidentiality, expected context, and consent. Equally important to the aforementioned data deliberations we explore, collecting and managing shared RHM data in a databank, while possible, are not without ethical, logistical, and rhetorical difficulties.

Over the last several decades there have been rapid advancements in treatment options available for infertility. Consequently, infertility has become a medicalized disease, which privileges a masculine epistemology. Problematically, this masculinist perception of infertility diminishes concern for the lived experiences of women living with infertility and ignores the many ways in which infertility manifests as a social condition. This study examines narratives of women diagnosed with infertility, gathered from online support groups. Through these narratives I introduces the concept of “invitational knowledge” as a means to understand how knowledge functions rhetorically to create space for discourses that deviate from the medicalized assumptions of infertility. Invitational knowledge highlights the epistemological roots of invitational rhetoric through adoption of a postmodern feminist epistemology and is characterized by five features: 1) rhetor agency; 2) emotional knowledge; 3) transformative discourse; 4) shared knowledge; and 5) asking questions rather than making judgments.

Nine people with mental health diagnoses wrote a dialogue to discuss how we navigate our conditions and ask for accommodations within an academic setting. We cogitate on the challenges of obtaining a diagnosis, how and when we disclose, the affordances and challenges of our symptoms, seeking accommodations, and advocating for ourselves. We consider how current scholarship and other perspectives are changing the conversation about mental health in the academy. We conclude that while the 2008 revisions to the Americans with Disabilities Act have addressed necessary accommodations, that those with mental health conditions are still seeking access.

In an effort to better understand the historical significance of the “mental illness as motive” narrative, this essay investigates what has been recognized as the first mass shooting in the modern United States—Howard Unruh’s 1949 mass shoot¬ing in Camden, New Jersey. Given that mass shootings were an unprecedented phenomenon, the news media played an important role in explaining the event. As will be shown, many Americans felt uncertain about how mental illness man¬ifested and who was vulnerable. Given the often undisclosed, albeit perceived threat of schizophrenia, the public needed reassurance that there would be some indicator of insanity. Accordingly, the media used evidence of religious fanaticism and unfavorable physical descriptions of Unruh to cast him as separate, outside, or an “other.” Ultimately, the media’s rhetorical choices differentiated Unruh and attempted to make mental illness easier to identify for an audience afraid of its influence.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.