Rhetoric of Health and Medicine

The rhetoric of health and medicine (RHM) is a growing transdisciplinary field concerned with the study and practice of persuasion in matters relating to health and medicine. Practitioners hail primarily from English and composition, technical writing, and communication. RHM's relationship to health communication is variously conceived as a subfield, a distinct tradition, or as an allied area. RHM scholarship focuses on how language and symbols are oriented to audiences, contexts, uses, and genres; how rhetoric constitutes knowledge and identity in embodied, performative, and textual ways; and how rhetoric organizes thought and action, or knowledge and practice, in health and medicine. RHM research often employs methods of rhetorical analysis, although methodological flexibility and mixed‐methods approaches, both qualitative and quantitative, appear prominently. RHM's scholarly community is supported through an expanding set of conferences, publishing venues, and online platforms.