Carolyn Skinner’s Women Physicians and Professional Ethos in Nineteenth-Century America is an impressive work; her research is both exhaustive and comprehensive. In this carefully documented text, ...

Abstract Through rhetorical analysis this study examines the recent discursive practices in our country about smallpox vaccinations. Michel Foucault maintains that no analysis is complete without contextualizing and historicizing the discourse we hope to understand. Smallpox vaccinations have a four-hundred-year-old history, and the insights gained from such historic studies can teach us much about our present course. Recent studies, including a Harvard survey, help us contextualize the present discourse. By comparing present and past practices, we gain a perspective that gives us predictive power as well as a concrete plan for the future in this time of bioterrorist threats.

The five authors call for increased awareness of disability in composition studies and argue that such an awareness can productively disrupt notions of “writing” and “composing” at the same time it challenges “normal”/“not normal” binaries in the field. In six sections: Brueggemann introduces and examines the paradox of disability’s “in-visibility” White considers the social construction of learning disabilities; Dunn analyzes the rhetoric of backlash against learning disabilities; Heifferon illustrates how a disability text challenged her students; Cheu describes how a disability-centered writing class made disability visible; all five conclude with challenges and directions for composition studies in intersecting with disability studies.