Providing a comprehensive overview of the richly interdisciplinary field of the rhetoric of health and medicine (RHM), this handbook maps out key ideas and texts that show how new knowledge is created, how new theories are built, how the past is conceptualized, and the future is imagined.

Established and rising scholars contribute chapters that synthesize and review existing scholarship both in RHM and in related areas of inquiry to spotlight questions and approaches through extended examples and open up questions and provocations about where the field might go next. The past, present, and future orientation allows both those new to RHM and those experienced in the field to understand the scholarly frameworks that guide the work of RHM and how these frameworks can address and ameliorate complex problems related to communicative dimensions of health and medicine. The handbook has six thematic sections that help guide readers to some of the main lines of inquiry within the field: Patient Agency and Health Advocacy, Health Inequities and Resistance, Reproductive Health, Biomedical and Clinical Medicine, Public and Global Health, and Health Technologies.

It will be of interest to students and scholars of rhetoric and writing studies, technical and professional communication, women’s and gender studies, critical disability studies, and the health humanities.

Lisa Melonçon is a Professor of Technical Communication and Chair of the Department of Interdisciplinary Studies at Clemson University, USA. She is the founding emerita co-editor of the Rhetoric of Health & Medicine, and founder of the Rhetoric of Health and Medical Symposium.

Cathryn Molloyis a Professor of Writing Studies at the University of Delaware, USA. She was a co-editor of the Rhetoric of Health and Medicine journal and is co-editor of Strategic Interventions in Mental Health Rhetoric (Routledge, 2022). She also wrote Rhetorical Ethos in Health and Medicine: Patient Credibility, Stigma, and Misdiagnosis (Routledge, 2019).

J. Blake Scott is a Professor of Writing and Rhetoric at the University of Central Florida, USA. He is the founding emeritus co-editor of Rhetoric of Health & Medicine, for which he currently co-edits a digital “Graphic RHM” (comics-based) column.