At the turn of the 20th century, the United States was at war with two seemingly different enemies: the first was Spanish colonial rule in Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines. The second enemy was the yellow fever virus which wreaked havoc on the physical and economic welfare of the U.S. In this essay, I conduct a rhetorical history about how the discovery of the mosquito vector for yellow fever was memorialized as a triumph of U.S. medicine, and how medical-military topoi are deployed to describe “conquest” over the virus. I argue that the nonhuman mosquito vector enables retroactive discussion of victory over an invisible enemy, creating rhetorical space between the realities of U.S imperialism and medical violence. This rhetorical history has consequences for how medical-military topoi continue to influence ways that the U.S. uses border control in response to pandemics, particularly those with nonhuman vectors or origins.

In September 2016, the US Food and Drug Administration held a public hearing inviting comments on the regulation of human cells, tissues, and cellular and tissue-based products. This essay uses Nikolas Rose’s concept of molecularization to show the rhetorical conflicts that emerged between lay public arguments and biomedical experts’ claims about the limits of personal autonomy, ownership, and the definition of cells and tissues as products. By analyzing how public actors negotiate the regulation of human tissues, I argue that a rhetorical account of molecularization shows how and for whom bodies are commodified and physically distributed. Through this rhetorical account of molecularization, I move between the molecular level of the body (the micro) and the situatedness of human bodies (the macro) to rethink the ways bodies are defined, even at the level of the cell.