This essay, adapted from one of the keynotes of the 2023 RHM symposium, explores the potential of linking the fields of rhetoric of health and medicine (RHM) and environmental rhetoric, and argues that health and healing are inextricably linked to the living world. Drawing on personal narrative, several brief case studies, and the conclusion of the author’s recent book, it charts several future research directions when environmental matters are understood as matters of health.

Abstract This article investigates an event in which the crew of Apollo 8 read the first verses of the book of Genesis on Christmas Eve, 1968, to a television audience of half a billion people. Drawing from letters from a NASA official who provided detailed rhetorical advice for the event, letters to the editor and op-eds in local newspapers, and an interview with one of the crew, it examines how the planners and the public assessed the appropriateness of the reading. While many different ways existed to interpret the occasion of the broadcast, we argue that the decorousness of the reading was understood as a function of the magnitude of the mission and the sublime “God's eye” view it afforded.

"Authoring Autism: On Rhetoric and Neurological Queerness." Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 51(1), pp. 71–72

This essay argues for understanding publicity as a kind of ability. Using a brief reading of accounts of nervous breakdown in US newspapers, it suggests that the condition was characterized by the inability, usually temporary, to appear in public. Previous scholarly approaches to public access have focused on the question of who is let in and who is kept out; this essay suggests that the capacity for public appearance also enables—and constrains—rhetorical action. In conclusion, it suggests that the public may be thought of as a kind of kairotic space, which allows us to see how publics may be disabling, but also how dispublicity might be accommodated.

Visibility is strategic. Visibility is insistent. Visibility is an argument—for disabled people, an argument for recognition and rights, a demand to be part of the public and participants in public...

In this article the authors envision a more durable and portable model of scholarship on public engagement with science through partnerships between rhetoricians of science and quantitative social scientists. The authors consider a number of barriers and limitations that make such partnerships difficult, with an eye toward discovering ways that researchers may overcome them. The authors conclude by articulating guidelines for reciprocal transdisciplinary work as well as specific recommended practices for such collaborations.

Drawing on our experiences with qualitative research involving health and medical topics to which we have a personal connection, this dialogue asks scholars in RHM to consider key methodological issues in embodied research by exploring: the choice to take up inquiries with which we have personal connections; the ethics of representation within these projects; and determining if, how, when, and to what degree we should reveal these connections in the research write-ups themselves. Our conversation is characterized by a “heuristic orientation”—defined as intuitive, creative, and generative. We conclude by offering a heuristic tool for researchers to use as they make crucial decisions in embodied research in RHM.

In Disability Rhetoric, Jay Dolmage draws together disability studies and rhetorical history and theory to make a compelling case for both the “central role of the body in rhetoric” (3) and disabil...

In 1972, vice presidential candidate Thomas Eagleton revealed to the American public that he had been hospitalized for depression on three occasions. The revelation seriously damaged the campaign of his running mate, George McGovern, and eventually led to Eagleton's dismissal from the ticket. This article seeks to understand the Eagleton Affair by showing how the stigma of mental illness functions as a form of rhetorical disability. Using a reading of stigma in ancient Greece and the work of Erving Goffman, this article argues that stigma can be viewed as a constitutive rhetorical act that also produces a disabling rhetorical effect: kakoethos, or bad character.