Knowledge and Rhetoric in Medical Commentary explores the dynamic between scholastic rhetoric and medical knowledge in ancient commentaries on a Mesopotamian Diagnostic Handbook, whose atypical language and ideas were harmonized with conventional ways of perceiving and describing the sick body.

Mesopotamian Commentaries on the Diagnostic Handbook Sa-gig includes a cuneiform edition, English translation, and notes on medical lexicography for thirty Sa-gig commentary tablets and fragments, and represents a companion volume to Knowledge and Rhetoric in Medical Commentary (Brill, 2019).

Assessing rhetorical principles of contemporary health issues Hypochondriacs are vulnerable to media hype, anorexics are susceptible to public scrutiny, and migraine sufferers are tainted with the history of the “migraine personality,” maintains rhetorical theorist Judy Z. Segal. All are influenced by the power of persuasion. Health and the Rhetoric of Medicine explores persistent health conditions that resist conventional medical solutions. Using a range of rhetorical principles, Segal analyzes how patients and their illnesses are formed within the physician/patient relationship. The intractable problem of a patient’s rejection of a doctor’s advice, says Segal, can be considered a rhetorical failure—a failure of persuasion. Examining the discourse of medicine through case studies, applications, and analyses, Segal illustrates how illnesses are described in ways that limit patients’ choices and satisfaction. She also illuminates psychiatric conditions, infectious diseases, genetic testing, and cosmetic surgeries through the lens of rhetorical theory. Health and the Rhetoric of Medicine bridges critical analysis for scholarly, professional, and lay audiences. Segal highlights the persuasive element in diagnosis, health policy, illness experience, and illness narratives. She also addresses questions of direct-to-consumer advertising of prescription drugs, the role of health information in creating the “worried well” and problems of trust and expertise in physician/patient relationships. A useful resource for critical common sense in everyday life, the text provides an effective examination of a society increasingly influenced by the rhetoric of health and medicine.

Methodologies for the Rhetoric of Health & Medicine charts new methodological territories for rhetorical studies and the emerging field of the rhetoric of health and medicine. It advances the larger goal of differentiating the rhetoric of health and medicine as a distinct but pragmatically diverse area of study.

Mesopotamian Commentaries on the Diagnostic Handbook Sa-gig includes a cuneiform edition, English translation, and notes on medical lexicography for thirty Sa-gig commentary tablets and fragments, and represents a companion volume to Knowledge and Rhetoric in Medical Commentary (Brill, 2019).

Unlike any existing studies of the medical humanities, The Chief Concern of Medicinebrings to the examination of medical practices a thorough---and clearly articulated---exposition of the nature of narrative. The book builds on the work of linguistics, semiotics, narratology, and discourse theory and examines numerous literary works and narrative "vignettes" of medical problems, situations, and encounters. Throughout, the book presents usable expositions of the ways storytelling organizes itself to allow physicians and other healthcare workers (and even patients themselves) to be more attentive to and self-conscious about the information---the "narrative knowledge"---of the patient's story.

This book explores rhetorical ethos and its ongoing role in patients’ credibility and in misdiagnoses stemming from gender, race and class-based biases. Drawing on the concept of ethos as a theoretical framework, it explores health and mental illness across different conditions and across different methodological approaches. Extending work on ethos in clinical encounters and public discourse about biomedicine and presenting new research on the rhetoric of mental health, stigma and mental illness, the book explores how bias in clinical settings can lead to symptoms labelled "in the patient’s head" masking treatable medical problems. This notable contribution to the rhetoric of health and medicine will be of interest to all researchers and graduate students of rhetoric and composition studies, rhetoric of health and medicine, disability studies, medical humanities, communication, and psychology.

In the Wake of the Compendia presents papers that examine the history of technical compendia as they moved between institutions and societies in ancient and medieval Mesopotamia. This volume offers new perspectives on the development and transmission of technical compilations, looking especially at the relationship between empirical knowledge and textual transmission in early scientific thinking. The eleven contributions to the volume derive from a panel held at the American Oriental Society in 2013 and cover more than three millennia of historical development, ranging from Babylonian medicine and astronomy to the persistence of Mesopotamian lore in Syriac and Arabic meditations on the properties of animals. The volume also includes major contributions on the history of Mesopotamian “rationality,” epistemic labels for tested and tried remedies, and the development of depersonalized case histories in Babylonian therapeutic compendia. Together, these studies offer an overview of several important moments in the development of non-Western scientific thinking and a significant contribution to our understanding of how traditions of technical knowledge were produced and transmitted in the ancient world.

Through close analysis of texts, cultural and civic communities, and intellectual history, the papers in this collection, for the first time, propose a dynamic relationship between rhetoric and medicine as discourses and disciplines of cure in early modern Europe. Although the range of theoretical approaches and methodologies represented here is diverse, the essays collectively explore the theories and practices, innovations and interventions, that underwrite the shared concerns of medicine, moral philosophy, and rhetoric: care and consolation, reading, policy, and rectitude, signinference, selfhood, and autonomy-all developed and refined at the intersection of areas of inquiry usually thought distinct. From Italy to England, from the sixteenth through to the mid-eighteenth century, early modern moral philosophers and essayists, rhetoricians and physicians investigated the passions and persuasion, vulnerability and volubility, theoretical intervention and practical therapy in the dramas, narratives, and disciplines of public and private cure. The essays are relevant to a wide range of readers, including cultural, literary, and intellectual historians, historians of medicine and philosophy, and scholars of rhetoric.

Rhetoric in the Flesh is the first book-length ethnographic study of the gross anatomy lab to explain how rhetorical discourses, multimodal displays, and embodied practices facilitate learning and technical expertise and how they shape participants’ perceptions of the human body. By investigating the role that discourses, displays, and human bodies play in the training and socialization of medical students, T. Kenny Fountain contributes to our theoretical and practical understanding of the social factors that make rhetoric possible and material in technical domains. Thus, the book also explains how these displays, discourses, and practices lead to the trained perspective necessary for expertise. This trained vision is constructed over time through what Fountain terms embodied rhetorical action, an intertwining of body-object-environment that undergirds all scientific, medical, and technical work. This book will be valuable for graduate and advanced undergraduate courses in technical and professional communication (technical communication theory and practice, visual or multimodal communication, medical technical communication) and rhetorical studies, including visual rhetoric, rhetoric of science, medical rhetoric, material rhetoric and embodiment, and ethnographic approaches to rhetoric.