The Rhetoric of Public Health for RHM Scholarship and Beyond

Abstract

Introduction to the special issue on public health.

What the first year of RHM illustrates is that much of the work done by rhetoricians of health and medicine intervenes in pubic conversations either implicitly or explicitly. And when it comes to matters of rhetorical public(s) and the connection to health, more work remains to be done around the concept of “the public” as a linguistic and practical commonplace. Thus, this special issue brings into sharp focus the necessity to coordinate efforts to explore the network of meaning and actions associated with the conceptualization and management of disease and well-being across populations, borders, and histories so as to present a new commonplace of the rhetoric of public health.