Rhetorical Questions of Health and Medicine

From the editors: "This book began as a broad set of interests in the rhetoric of health and medicine. Between 2004 and 2007, the authors in this book met in various configurations at the National Communication Association, Rhetorical Society of America, and Society for Social Studies of Science conferences. The conversations there began to produce a set of questions that emerged time and again. We began to think of these as "rhetorical questions of health and medicine" and recognized that, despite the diversity of rhetorical text, our questions emerged from a common disciplinary tendency, rhetoric and its subfield studying the rhetoric of health and medicine. Crucially, at the beginning of 2008, we were able to come together with the support of the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies at the University of British Columbia. As a Distinguished Scholar in Residence at the Institute, Judy Segal had dedicated time and energy to the questions at the foundation of this volume, and she used the generous support of the Institute to organize our workshop ("Rhetoric and Knowledge-Making in Health and Medicine"). We gathered in Vancouver to speak with a range of researcher/scholars from disciplines across the university (in humanities, social sciences, medicine, and health sciences)-an audience that was drawn, it turned out, to the ability of a rhetorical approach to ask questions of health and medicine that other researchers had not always considered; these were, what Judy had called, "prior questions," questions of meaning that usefully can be posed in advance of questions of health and medical practice. We also gathered in Vancouver, though, to speak with each other. We spent the second day of our workshop in a room overlooking English Bay, with food, talking about the papers we had brought to our meeting, and picking up conversations we had started all over the world and had been able to continue, to that point, only at the next conference or meeting, or, of course, on email. For this opportunity t