Abduction, a mode of reasoning identified by Charles Sanders Peirce, informs theories of clinical decision-­making, but its existing applications to the medical sciences have remained narrow. Building from existing research in the context of patient noncompliance and clinical inertia, this paper advocates a broader understanding of abductive reasoning rooted within the nature of language itself. An example of such a reading of abduction is the theory of triadic communication articulated by American doctor-­turned-­novelist Walker Percy. Percy’s scholarship offers an impetus to examine noncompliance, inertia, and other loci of uncertainty as opportunities for learning, growth, and development of RHM perspectives.

As professor of Greek and theology at the University of Wittenberg, Philip Melanchthon (1497–1560) authored three of the most important rhetorical textbooks of his era. Melanchthon’s addition of a new genre of rhetoric, the didactic, to the classical genres of demonstrative, judicial, and deliberative oratory illuminates his view of rhetoric as an instrument for the renaissance and reformation of traditions and institutions. Cultivating faculties of judgment and understanding was Melanchthon’s prescription for survival amid theological and political chaos—a prescription that continues to hold value for rhetors in the current historical moment.