Full Description
From the editorsrhetoric of health and medicine. Between 2004 and 2007, the authors in this book met in various configurations at the National Communication Association, Rhetorical Society of America, and Society for Social Studies of Science conferences. The conversations there began to produce a set of questions that emerged time and again. We began to think of these as "rhetorical questions of health and medicine" and recognized that, despite the diversity of rhetorical text, our questions emerged from a common disciplinary tendency, rhetoric and its subfield studying the rhetoric of health and medicine. Crucially, at the beginning of 2008, we were able to come together with the support of the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies at the University of British Columbia. As a Distinguished Scholar in Residence at the Institute, Judy Segal had dedicated time and energy to the questions at the foundation of this volume, and she used the generous support of the Institute to organize our workshop ("Rhetoric and Knowledge-Making in Health and Medicine"). We gathered in Vancouver to speak with a range of researcher/scholars from disciplines across the university (in humanities, social sciences, medicine, and health sciences)-an audience that was drawn, it turned out, to the ability of a rhetorical approach to ask questions of health and medicine that other researchers had not always considered; these were, what Judy had called, "prior questions," questions of meaning that usefully can be posed in advance of questions of health and medical practice. We also gathered in Vancouver, though, to speak with each other. We spent the second day of our workshop in a room overlooking English Bay, with food, talking about the papers we had brought to our meeting, and picking up conversations we had started all over the world and had been able to continue, to that point, only at the next conference or meeting, or, of course, on email. For this opportunity t
Contents
Chapter 1 1. Why Ask Rhetorical Questions? Asking Rhetorical Questions of Health and Medicine Chapter 2 2. What, in Addition to Drugs, Do Pharmaceutical Ads Sell?The Rhetoric of Pleasure in Direct-to-Consumer Advertising for Prescription Pharmaceuticals Chapter 3 3. How Do Mice Mean? The Rhetoric of Measurement in the Medical Laboratory Chapter 4 4. Is the Genre Extant? The Curious Case of Psychiatry's Case History Chapter 5 5. How Does a Pathogen Become a Terrorist? The Collective Transformation of Risk into Bio(in)security Chapter 6 6. How Do Midwives Talk with Women? The Rhetorical Genre of Informed Choice in Midwifery Chapter 7 7. Does Biomedicine Control for Rhetoric? Configuring Practitioner-Patient Interaction Chapter 8 8. How Do Children Learn about Illness and Death? Managing Suffering and Sickness Chapter 9 9. How Do You Talk to a Patient? A Question of Decorum
