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Rhetoric of health and medicine


The rhetoric of health and medicine is an academic discipline concerning language and symbols in health and medicine.Rhetoric most commonly refers to the persuasive element in human interactions and is often best studied in the specific situations in which it occurs. The rhetoric of health and medicine specifically creates, analyzes, and criticizes how messages are delivered and structured in medicine- and health-related contexts.

Practitioners from the rhetoric of health and medicine field hail from a variety of disciplines, including English studies, communication studies, and health humanities. Through methods such as content analysis, survey methodology, and usability testing, researchers in this sphere recognize the importance of communication to successful healthcare. They focus on topics ranging from patient-physician communication, to health literacy, to the language that constructs disease knowledge.

The rhetoric of health and medicine is tied to the emergence of rhetoric of science in the early 1970s and 1980s. Contemporary theorists such as Kenneth Burke, Michel Foucault, Thomas Kuhn, Bruno Latour, and Steve Woolgar laid the theoretical groundwork for this early interest in the persuasive dimensions of scientific language. In the 1980s the field shifted when rhetorical critics like Martha Solomon and Charles Anderson began analyzing texts on biomedicine. Solomon analyzed the rhetoric used in medical reports during the Tuskegee Syphilis Project, while Anderson examined the writings of surgeon Richard Selzer to comment on the rhetoric of surgery.


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