Rhetoric, Health, and Medicine

Catalog description

This course explores rhetorical strategies that medical researchers and practitioners, patients, and advocates use to make healthcare-related decisions. Through careful analysis of technical writing (e.g., experimental articles and research reviews) and popular media (e.g., newspaper articles, television programs, blogs, and social media posts), students approach health and medicine as socially constructed enterprises, which are profoundly mediated through language and other symbolic systems. Through guided research and practice composing in various genres, students develop strategies for ethically contributing to technical and public debates about health and medicine. Specific content might include the following: how scientific communities achieve consensus about medical knowledge; how medical knowledge makes its way into peoples' daily lives; how the overwhelming amount of contradictory information about what it means to be healthy makes it difficult to make informed decisions about their healthcare; how people acquire medical literacies given the complexity of medical knowledge; and develop an understanding of what medical "expertise" means. Prerequisite: ENG 110 . Offered Annually.