Durability, Portability, and Responsivity in Rhetorics of Health and Medicine (RHM):

This essay reports results from a scoping study of recent rhetoric of health and medicine (RHM) research published in article form prior to the emergence of the subfield’s stand-alone journal, Rhetoric of Health & Medicine (RHM). Our corpus consists of 250 articles published between 2006 and 2020 across eight journals. Drawing on findings from our scoping study, we review RHM researchers’ methodological and evidential choices, which provides a baseline to which we can compare the next generation of RHM research. Such comparisons should illuminate the strides RHM has taken to improve our research’s durability, portability, and responsivity to matters of critical import. Finally, we conclude with an invitation to other researchers to continue scoping studies such as this one by adapting our analytic protocol and updating or expanding our corpus, both of which we make available to readers.