Medical Rhetoric Research Articles

‘La Décadente a fait son temps’: Rachilde and Georges de Peyrebrune's Une décadente

In 1886, Georges de Peyrebrune (1841–1917) published the novella Une décadente, a scarcely veiled depiction – and biting critique – of Rachilde (1860–1953) and her unconventional lifestyle. In her depiction of Hélione, a fictionalized version of Rachilde, she borrows from contemporary medical discourses on hysteria and suggests that her heroine's true fulfillment can only be realized through motherhood. Peyrebrune positions these male-authored discourses alongside a concurrent ridicule of Hélione's aspirations as a writer of decadent literature. However, in an unanticipated twist in the final pages, the discursive medical framework of her narrative collapses, exposing the precariousness of the literary and scientific constructions of hysteria and thus leading readers to rethink Peyrebrune's traditionalist views. In positioning these discourses within the larger aesthetic and ideological interrogations of the text, we may uncover Peyrebrune's own revision – albeit subtle at times – of a fictional model and the medical rhetoric that shapes it.

Medical Rhetoric and the Sympathetic “Inebriet”: 1870–1930

The modern view of addiction as a progressive brain disease originated in the sec­ond half of the 19th and early decades of the 20th centuries. Historians attribute the shift from a moral to a medical concept to the efforts of a small but well-organized band of physicians forming what is known as the Inebriety Movement in the United States and Great Britain. Members aimed to distribute the disease theory to a dis­interested and biased medical community, establish protocols for evidence-based treatments, and transfer the management of drinkers and drug users away from religious organizations and penal institutions to the care of trained practitioners. Members’ efforts to rhetorically achieve these goals on the pages of medical jour­nals has received scant attention in the scholarly community. Based on an analysis of 92 medical articles on addiction published between 1870 and 1930, I will reveal a complex, inclusive, and multimodal rhetoric employed to refigure “drunkards” and “underworld” drug “fiends” as patients and their confounding addictive behaviors as symptoms rather than signs of degeneracy. Before advanced under­standing of brain’s pleasure circuits and dopamine receptors, these early medical authors dramatically rendered the havoc that substances can play on those sys­tems. Recovering the narratives and patient tropes I find in these texts may be instructive as we try to find ways to erase persistent stigma surrounding addiction. My findings will hopefully encourage dialogue and new research pathways for scholars interested in the rhetorical history of addiction.

Sign of Pathology: U.S. Medical Rhetoric on Abortions, 1800s‐1960s. By NathanStormer. Pp. xi, 256, University Park, PA, The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2015, $69.95.

Sign of Pathology: U.S. Medical Rhetoric on Abortions, 1800s‐1960s<i>.</i> By NathanStormer. Pp. xi, 256, University Park, PA, The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2015, $69.95.

A Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) Soundscape: Physiological Monitors, Rhetorical Ventriloquism, and Earwitnessing

Considering aurality (hearing) and sonicity (sounds/noises) in our research sites promises much for rhetoric of health and medicine (RHM) scholars. To show this value, I argue aural awareness of soundscapes provide opportunities to sensorially enrich our understanding of sonic experiences in acute care hospital settings, as in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) site at the center of my case study. To that end, the purpose of this article is threefold: 1) to identify aurality as a sensorial aspect in healthcare sensescapes worthy of RHM inquiry; 2) to foreground how these soundscapes shape care and caretaking in healthcare and clinical settings; and 3) to propose more careful considering and attending, as “earwitnesses,” to the sonic experiences of bodies in these settings. In the process, I propose “rhetorical ventriloquism” as a useful, responsible concept to consider how these sounds and noises appear to stand in for bodies and their physiologies and shape those bodies’ care, while amplifying those bodies as the healthcare technologies speak and sound for them. Furthermore, I suggest RHM scholars can act as earwitnesses who attend to sonicity and aurality in healthcare and clinical settings, as well as study how people are sensorially trained in these settings. CLICK HERE TO ACCESS SOUND FILES

Ethics for Rhetoric, the Rhetoric of Ethics, and Rhetorical Ethics in Health and Medicine

Should, and could, the rhetoric of health and medicine (RHM) develop a professional disciplinary code of ethics? In this commentary, I argue that RHM has special need for a code of ethics, but that we encounter unique barriers to codification. These barriers arise not because we are not ethical, but because we are distinctively ethical. By analyzing the rhetoric of the professional disciplinary code of ethics as a genre, it becomes evident that codes have the potential to restrict a humanities field’s ethical discourse to the domain of academic research and to limit its participation in the domains of health and medicine. Subsequently, I levy that certain generic conventions of the code of ethics do not adequately meet our needs as a health humanities field. I raise, instead, the possibility of an alternative statement of ethics that better mediates the health and humanities divide. Towards the feasibility of this prospect, I begin to theorize the notion of a “rhetorical ethics”: a conceptualization of RHM as a distinctive and legitimate approach to ethical discourse in health and medicine.

A Dialogue with Medical Interpreters About Rhetoric, Culture, and Language

Through conversations with medical interpreters who work in Grand Rapids, Michigan, this dialogue piece illustrates multiple ways that medical interpretation can be further considered as a method and practice within the rhetoric of health and medicine (RHM). By sharing specific methodological frameworks for researching medical interpretation, the authors introduce possibilities for how RHM research can continue to engage in work that extends beyond English-dominant communication.

Assessing Perspectivalism in Patient Participation: An Evaluation of FDA Patient and Consumer Representative Programs

Recent research in rhetoric of health and medicine (RHM) has worked to evaluate the effectiveness of patient inclusion initiatives in health policy decision-making. Extending this line of research, this article evaluates the extent to which the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) patient and consumer representative programs meaningfully engage patient experiences. In so doing, this study provides directed and summative content analyses of pharmaceuticals policy deliberation at 163 FDA drug advisory committee meetings. The results indicate that the current implementation of the patient and consumer representative programs do not adequately ensure that patient experiences are being included as a part of advisory committee deliberation or subsequent pharmaceuticals policy. Additionally, the results presented support the growing concern that attempts to include patient perspectives in health policy may actually further marginalize patient populations.

Manifesting a Scholarly Dwelling Place in RHM

With joy and gratitude, we present the first double issue of Rhetoric of Health & Medicine ( RHM ), the new scholarly home for the emergent multi-and inter-disciplinary field of the same name. For us, this journal’s manifestation has been a labor of love, borne out of a commitment to advance this field for its pioneers, newcomers, members-to-be, and our various (potential) interlocutors and stakeholders. Although the rhetoric of health and medicine (RHM) has been recognized and named as a field relatively recently (for the most comprehensive accounts of its emergence, see Meloncon & Frost, 2015; Malkowski, Scott, & Keranen, 2016), threads of its scholarship began appearing at least as early as the 1980s (see Reynolds, this volume). Further, the field’s growth has been fueled by the coalescence of community through scholarly meetings (e.g., pre-conferences, conference panels and workshops, RHM Symposium) and special interest groups (e.g., CCCC Medical Rhetoric Standing Group, ARSTM); online forums (e.g., medicalrhetoric.com; Flux Facebook group); and a surprisingly expansive network of scholars and scholarship connected through publication venues (e.g., journal special issues, edited collections, scholarly encyclopedias). RHM is truly a crowd-sourced endeavor, and we are thankful to have been entrusted with it.

“[M]ost plain, rational, and easie”: Rhetorical Disavowal in Early Eighteenth-Century Inoculation Pamphlets

In the second decade of the eighteenth century, English physicians mobilized a rapidly expanding print culture to launch themselves into the thick of public debate with sharply worded pamphlets defending and denouncing the newly introduced practice of inoculation (the less effective forerunner of vaccination). This paper explores the new kind of medical rhetoric that flourished in the midst of this controversy, one that downplays medical authority and even disavows its own rhetorical character, much like the vaccination debates of today.

Mapping the Terrain: Examining the Conditions for Alignment Between the Rhetoric of Health and Medicine and the Medical Humanities

ABSTRACTThis article offers an empirical study of literature in the rhetoric of health and medicine (RHM) and the medical humanities (MH). Article traces the topics, funding mechanisms, research methods, theoretical frameworks, evidence types, audience, discourse arrangement patterns, and action orientation that constitute the scholarship in the sample to offer a landscape of the current state of RHM and the MH. Findings can be leveraged to assess the potential for alignment between these fields for future research.

From Girlhood to Motherhood: Rituals of Childbirth and Obstetrical Medicine Re-Examined through John Milton.

This article considers how seventeenth-century writer John Milton engages in modes of thinking that register the obstetric revolution occurring during the period. During a time when physicians were gaining entry to the birthing room, a medical rhetoric of childbirth was developing that cast childbirth in new pathological terms. Milton's A Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle demonstrates how childbirth was influenced by emerging obstetrical language and practice, as well as the ways in which a writer might question such influence. Finally, this article also draws links between disrupted historical rituals of childbirth and modern anxieties about medically-centred birthing practices.

New technologies, patient experience, theoretical approaches and heuristics in RHM

In the August 2015 Communication Design Quarterly (CDQ) special issue on Rhetoric of Health and Medicine (RHM), Lisa Meloncon and Erin Frost introduced readers to this "emerging field." Since a Poiroi commentary in 2013 written by Scott, Segal, and Keränen, numerous scholars that earlier identified our sub-discipline with the terms medical rhetoric, have embraced this what might be seen as a more inclusive term, although I would argue that for some of us, the term rhetoric already included at least every possible manifestation of health, medicine and language. However, RHM does indeed cast a wider net, as pointed out in the 2015 issue, including essays on architecture, social work, and psychology. While rhetoric per se is certainly found within all fields, if writing about such fields and especially from such fields is included in RHM, then such a transdisciplinary impulse takes us very much further indeed. While this particular issue can easily find itself under the RHM umbrella, these particular scholars writing here were invited because they had participated in 2016 as a very successful panel at SIGDOC annual conference. These five scholars have much to share and teach us, as well as move us forward in our thinking, research, writing and participation in health and medical settings.

Signs of Pathology: U.S. Medical Rhetoric on Abortion, 1800s–1960s

Book Review| June 01 2017 Signs of Pathology: U.S. Medical Rhetoric on Abortion, 1800s–1960s Signs of Pathology: U.S. Medical Rhetoric on Abortion, 1800s–1960s. By Nathan Stormer. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2014; pp. 256. $69.95 cloth. S. Scott Graham S. Scott Graham University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Rhetoric and Public Affairs (2017) 20 (2): 372–380. https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.20.2.0372 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation S. Scott Graham; Signs of Pathology: U.S. Medical Rhetoric on Abortion, 1800s–1960s. Rhetoric and Public Affairs 1 June 2017; 20 (2): 372–380. doi: https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.20.2.0372 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveMichigan State University PressRhetoric and Public Affairs Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2017 Michigan State University Board of Trustees. All rights reserved.2017 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Medical Rhetoric in the Formation of Communicative Competence of Pediatricians

In the training of modern doctors, great attention should be paid to the formation of communicative competence, since the success of medical practice is not only related to medical knowledge, but also to communicative skills. Doctor is a linguoactive profession: speech and communication skills are necessary for the doctor in medical, preventive, educational, organizational and management activities. Medical rhetoric as a theory and practice of effective speech behavior in a public monologue and dialogue can contribute to the preparation of future pediatricians.

Building on Bibliography: Toward Useful Categorization of Research in Rhetorics of Health and Medicine

This article reports on an analysis of research questions in the emerging field of Rhetoric of Health and Medicine (RHM). The data set included 54 articles, published in 4 journals between the years 2000 and 2014. The articles were found to address five areas, including questions about (a) the identity of RHM, (b) disciplinarity, (c) ecological interaction, (d) maneuverability, and (e) process. Overall, this article argues that RHM tends to take a critical stance toward medicine, treating it as a monolithic profession and set of discourses. Given the conclusions of many of the articles in the data set, this stance may be unwarranted. The article concludes by suggesting future directions for scholarship in RHM.

Midwives and Pregnant Women of Color: Why We Need to Understand Intersectional Changes in Midwifery to Reclaim Home Birth

The vast majority of births occur in hospitals attended by physicians. However, this has not always been the case. Prior to the turn of the twentieth century, home births held the majority and were primarily attended by midwives, the majority of whom were women of color and immigrant women. The move toward hospital birth is rarely discussed today and midwifery and home birth, though now both experiencing a small comeback, are often viewed with skepticism and fear. This Note discusses the raced and gendered history of this change in American birth norms and argues that the racist and sexist motivations and phenomena that prompted the move into hospitals and away from midwives is relevant to understanding current birth trends and statistics. The Note begins with an overview and discussion of the raced and gendered history of American midwifery. Next, the Note explains the history of the Medicalization of pregnancy and birth–here, exerting excessive medical rhetoric into and oversight over reproduction, and especially women of color’s reproduction, in order to control it. Finally the Note considers current home birth and midwifery trends and statistics and their connection to the race and gender discrimination of twentieth century birth and midwifery. The Note concludes that the racist and sexist underpinnings of the change from home to hospital birth still operate in our current birthing systems to keep women of color in hospitals and out of the midwifery profession.

Medical Rhetoric in Training Pediatricians

Rhetoric studies can play a positive role in the formation of verbal and cogitative activity and communicative competence of the future pediatrician. The latest scientific researches evidenced that the success of a doctor's practice is related not only to his highly professional medical knowledge, but also to his ability to talk, persuade, and communicate. Rhetoric is the theory and practice of the effective verbal expression of a thought in terms of a public monologue and dialogue; Medical (private) rhetoric is aimed at the development of general and professional verbal, cogitative, and communicative abilities of the future doctor. Methodically competent combination of disciplines «Medical Rhetoric» and «Psychology and Pedagogy» into a single module can enhance educational outcomes in teaching students.

Wilderness Laboratories: Rhetorical Acts of Surveillance at American Summer Camps

Usually you are called to come to infirmary when you are least expecting to, you don't have time even to take a bath. Being a new girl of course you don't know what to expect because no two examinations are alike.First you are shown into a where you are instructed to take off all your clothes. Of course everyone tries to leave on some of their underclothes but eventually you get all of your own clothes off and put on one of those so-called angel robes....Next you are shown into a room, which by way has all windows open, through which a cool breeze is blowing. There you are confronted by M. T.,1 and I'll tell you right now you would never think by looking at her that she had such fingers. She pokes you all over, then tries her best to you but takes pity and doesn't deliver blow that would really do it.The little room described above suggests a child's fear of physician's office as girl notes lack of privacy and respect that accompany a systematic poking and prodding of her body. The feelings of claustrophobia and surveillance seem to intensify as hard fingers try to knock over patient during inspection. The cool breeze coming in windows is only sign that this doctor's visit occurs anywhere near nature. may be surprising is this letter's provenance. It was written by a child attending a summer camp in 1920s.The description in letter bridges two different epistemologies of body: one located in what appears to be a carefree wilderness, and other connected closely to urban doctor's office, where one might imagine microscopes and lab equipment surrounding patient. Within description, fingers of scientist seem to reach uncomfortably into wilderness in a manner that counters typical camp images of roasting marshmallows a fire and living in rustic cabins. In Nature: The Rise of American Summer Camp, Leslie Paris explains, Children's inculcation into camps' body-focused culture began when they underwent precamp physicals. These exams were designed primarily to keep ill and potentially contagious children out of camps, where they might put others at risk (123). Some may agree that Paris was right when she stated that at summer camp the new interwar social science rhetoric never completely overrode a more sentimental wilderness narrative (Children's Nature 240); however, private summer camps reflect urban society's preoccupation with body surveillance much more than they purport to separate from it, and this is illustrated by focusing on child's body across and within iconic settings at summer camps in early years of their development. A rhetorical study of early camp documents and traditions reveals that wilderness, under a scientific gaze, became a laboratory featuring human sub- jects whose growth depended on intervention of health experts to make them superior in body and mind.Exploring rhetoric, particularly rhetoric associated with body, means embracing what Debra Hawhee explains as transdisciplinarity. In her work on Kenneth Burke and body, Hawhee says, What distinguishes transdisciplinarity from interdisciplinarity is its effort to suspend-however temporary-one's own disciplinary terms and values in favor of a broad, open, multilevel inquiry (3). This study of how American summer camp became a laboratory more than a pastoral setting, draws from disparate sources of information: reports of education in schools and cities to contrast those about camp settings, recent scholarship in disability and medical rhetoric, studies in eugenics rhetoric, and assistance from those who theorize relationships between body and environment. Jay Dolmage is correct when he says that rhetoric may be viewed as the strategic study of circulation of power through communication (3). To discuss responsibly how such power circulates, it is important to look across disciplines to theorize how body becomes a site of power negotiation. …

Doctored: The Medicine of Photography in Nineteenth‐Century AmericaTanyaSheehan. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011.

Doctored: The Medicine of Photography in Nineteenth-Century America Tanya Sheehan. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011.In Doctored: The Medicine of Photography in Nineteenth-Century Tanya Sheehan argues that while physicians used photographs to help legitimize their profession during nineteenth century, photographers used medical rhetoric and authority of science to shape their own professional reputations. Centering on Philadelphia, not only heart of burgeoning medical profession but also development of daguerreotype and later photography, Sheehan examines trade journals to explore how these men both knowingly and unknowingly adopted medical metaphors and imagery to establish themselves as powerful agents of health promotion and change. Using discourse analysis, such as work of Michel Foucault, Sheehan's interdisciplinary approach demonstrates that photographers were contributing to a cultural discourse on diseased and disordered body in urban America, which ultimately addressed anxieties of a nation torn apart by Civil War and a white middle who saw its city overwhelmed by problems of overcrowding, racial conflict, disease, and poverty (11). By controlling and manipulating body, photographers helped shape social order (12).While most historians of photography focus on profession's attempts to legitimize its position as an art form, Sheehan's research suggests that photographers used just as much effort to establish themselves as men of science. According to Sheehan, photography mimicked medicine's path to professionalization. Daguerreotypist Marcus Aurelius Root, for example, expressed interest in establishing schools and requiring photographers to take part in an apprenticeship (33-36). It was photographer's embrace of anatomy, however, that lent profession scientific authority. Sheehan argues that this was because knowledge of anatomy allowed photographers to establish a medically-inspired language for their practice, giving photographers a powerful claim to their subject's bodies. Like physicians, photographers diagnosed physical appearance of their subjects and used their knowledge to manipulate body to make it appear healthy (59). In manner of surgeons, photographers could perform operations on their photos, retouching them to give the appearance of smoother, blemish-free skin with even pigmentation, fuller cheeks, a straighter mouth, and well-rested eyes, which contribute to our reading of subject as youthful, racially white, feminine, and middle class (69). For Sheehan, rhetoric of science not only provided legitimacy, it also placed photography in larger realm of politics, giving photographers power to define health, whiteness, and middle-class identity. …

Is There a Moral Obligation to Develop Brain Implants Involving NanoBionic Technologies? Ethical Issues for Clinical Trials

In their article published in Nanoethics, “Ethical, Legal and Social Aspects of Brain-Implants Using Nano-Scale Materials and Techniques”, Berger et al. suggest that there may be a prima facie moral obligation to improve neuro implants with nanotechnology given their possible therapeutic advantages for patients [Nanoethics, 2:241–249]. Although we agree with Berger et al. that developments in nanomedicine hold the potential to render brain implant technologies less invasive and to better target neural stimulation to respond to brain impairments in the near future, we argue against presenting the development of nanobionic clinical devices in terms of a moral obligation to conduct this research. In the first part of the paper, we consider what a duty to pursue new technologies might mean, and in the second we explore some of the negative consequences of defending such development as a moral obligation based on potential benefit. We argue that promoting the advances available to brain implants through developments in nanotechnology and bionics could contribute to medical rhetoric that indirectly increases the risk of exposing patients to harm when participating in clinical trials. We argue that rather than there being a moral obligation to improve nanobionics implants because of their potential benefit, the pursuit of improved neuro implants must be balanced against the prima facie obligations to protect patients against harm and to promote and protect patient autonomy.