This dialogue examines rural health and healthcare by putting rhetoricians who study rural communities in direct conversation with healthcare professionals who practice in and advocate for rural communities. Thematic analysis of the dialogue revealed that conversations about healthcare in rural communities can simultaneously address what rural communities lack, how rural communities are exploited, and how strong and resilient rural communities are, while also emphasizing what opportunities there are for scholars and practitioners to partner together for the benefit of rural communities. The dialogue demonstrates how working directly with key stakeholders like medical providers can be both practically and intellectually fruitful when addressing complex issues like rural health and RHM.

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.