Rhetoric of Medicine

The Study of Rhetoric and Its Application to Medicine

The study and practice of the art of rhetoric has an ancient history that has been updated for contemporary times. Although formal instruction in rhetoric is often traced to classical Greece, fragments from many ancient cultures offer precepts for enhancing the effectiveness and artistry of speech. Nonetheless, rhetoric's origins are often associated with the teachings of 5th-century Greek philosophers who established principles of persuasion that spread through the Roman Empire, forming a large part of the Western rhetorical tradition. Generally conceived as a civic art used to persuade in courtrooms, assemblies, and public festivals, rhetoric was language intended to produce effect. The Greco-Roman rhetorical tradition supplies a rich lexicon for analyzing the rhetoric of medicine. Kairos, the notion of appropriately timed discourse, prepon, the idea of a fitting response to discourse, and ethos, the notion that perceptions of character shape audience belief and action, are but three useful concepts for analyses of how timing, appropriateness, and character influence rhetorical operations in medicine.

Yet, because medical rhetoric increasingly occurs within organizational contexts in a mass-mediated global society, contemporary rhetorical theory also incorporates theories of mass-mediated communication, organizational dynamics, power/ knowledge, and globalization. During the 20th century, the definition of rhetoric broadened from civic oratory to include any human symbol use—including visual rhetoric, commercial speech, and new media.

In recent decades, a group of scholars recognizing the significance of language to medically relevant practices has drawn from a multidisciplinary initiative called the rhetoric of science to study how persuasive discourse cultivates particular understandings of health and medicine. As a scholarly initiative, the rhetoric of science emerged in the late 1970s to analyze how scientists persuade themselves and others of scientific facts and processes. Because medicine is partially art and partially science, it lends itself to study by a wider group of scholars than rhetoricians specializing in scientific discourse, however. The rhetoric of medicine as an area of inquiry emerged therefore in part as a subarea of rhetoric of science, in part from studies of medical discourse by rhetoricians not trained in scientific rhetoric, and in part from a translation of social theories about medicine and health into rhetorical terms.

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