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.

Contralateral prophylactic mastectomy (CPM) is the removal of both breasts when one is affected by cancer. Researchers and journalists typically attribute increased use of this controversial procedure to patient misunderstanding of breast cancer risk. Thus, efforts to curb CPM use focus on better patient education. I argue that such efforts are potentially ineffective insofar as they fail to recognize that risk isn’t just something that patients know but also something that they do, and that how they do it affects their healthcare decisions. I further argue that this failure can lead to impaired communication about CPM by perpetuating sexist stereotypes of women as too emotional to make good decisions. To improve communication, then, I draw on screening guidelines and public discourse about CPM to show how patients do breast cancer risk, arguing that they often experience a kind of overtreatment that makes CPM an effective, if unconventional, treatment choice.

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.

Introduction to the special issue on public health. What the first year of RHM illustrates is that much of the work done by rhetoricians of health and medicine intervenes in pubic conversations either implicitly or explicitly. And when it comes to matters of rhetorical public(s) and the connection to health, more work remains to be done around the concept of “the public” as a linguistic and practical commonplace. Thus, this special issue brings into sharp focus the necessity to coordinate efforts to explore the network of meaning and actions associated with the conceptualization and management of disease and well-being across populations, borders, and histories so as to present a new commonplace of the rhetoric of public health.

Debates over medicine and biotechnology have often had recourse to science fiction narratives. One narrative, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, is unique in that both proponents and opponents of research treated references to the novel as a legitimate rhetorical strategy. This essay uses debates from 1998 to 2003 over embryonic stem cell research and cloning to illustrate two types of references to Huxley’s novel. Allusions to the novel identify the presence and salience of ethical concerns, acting as an opening gambit in public discourse. Allegorical uses yoke the novel to a narrow pretext of conservative bioethics. After identifying the contours of allusion and allegory, this essay argues for eschewing allegory in order to preserve a rhetorical commonplace for public discourse on medicine and biotechnology.

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.

This article extends Keränen’s (2010) application of the concept of autopoiesis, or self-generation, to rhetoric by examining how arguments about wellness and natural health self-generate in public discourse. The article analyzes 20 qualitative interviews on what it means in contemporary culture to be “well”—how wellness differs from illness, how it is distinct from health, and how it can be maintained and enhanced. The analysis shows that wellness discourse is predicated on the entanglement of seemingly opposed logics of restoration and enhancement: those who seek wellness through dietary supplements and natural health products seek simultaneously to restore their bodies, perceived as malfunctioning, to prior states of ideal health and well-being, and to enhance their bodies by optimizing bodily processes to be “better than well” (Elliott, 2003). The fusing of these two logics creates an essentially closed rhetorical system in which wellness is always a moving target.