Kelly Pender’s Being at Genetic Risk: Toward a Rhetoric of Care makes an important contribution to scholarship in the rhetoric of health and medicine (RHM); rhetoric of science, technology, and med...

Relying on the case of a mixed-methods study centered on patients’ strategies for establishing their credibility in clinical conversations, this essay argues that the more intentional and effective the participant recruitment and the more specific the inquiry, the more likely technical communication and rhetoric of science researchers are to encounter potentially powerful partners through which they might get and analyze compelling data and, thus, gain engaged audiences outside of their disciplines.

If I were to attempt to summarize S. Scott Graham’s formidable volume The Politics of Pain Medicine: A Rhetorical-Ontological Inquiry with the briefest of pithy quotes from within its pages, I migh...

Treatment for Dissociative Identity Disorder aims to integrate diverse narratives into a coherent whole. However, no compelling reason exists to privilege a cohesive narrative; in fact, treatment may at times introduce false memories in an attempt to construct such a narrative. This essay critically examines dominant conceptions of memory and consciousness based on logic and coherence in order to argue for the value and validity of fragmented narratives as a legitimate rhetoric.

This essay uses data from a field-based study to describe the everyday rhetorical performances through which ethos is established when the orator’s credibility has been compromised by stigma born of chronic mental illness. These strategies, called “recuperative ethos,” include displays of astuteness, references to strong human connections, and appeals to religious topoi. Further, the essay describes innovative rhetorical performances, called “agile epistemologies,” which include logical contradiction, metonymic parallels, enthymemes, and expansive views on human agency. Taken together, these terms use the voices and experiences of mentally ill participants to add important insight into the rhetoric of mental healthcare and the rhetoric of medicine, health, and wellness.

The malcliché, far from being the throwaway material of unfortunate misspeak, and far from being the ugly stepchild of something already detestable, can be a vital source of new semantic complexity as well as an unconscious artistic creation worthy of our attention.