The Rhetoric of Public Health for RHM Scholarship and Beyond

Public health, a widely encompassing term often used to describe ways that various stakeholders communicate about and respond to issues of health that effect large populations, tends to be centered on concerns about prevention, containment, empowerment, and advocacy in relation to disease. As a distinct professional field and set of practices, public health is sometimes described and categorized as the branch of healthcare primarily concerned with populations, whereas medicine focuses more on individual health (Public Health, 2019). The American Public Health Association specifies that "while a doctor treats people who are sick, those of us working in public health try to prevent people from getting sick or injured in the first place. We also promote wellness by encouraging healthy behaviors" (para. 2, 2018). In addition, scholars and practitioners in public health track and analyze emergent health patterns, react in times of crises, and provide important insights into the effectiveness of policies, procedures, and responses. Strategies used by public health professionals to "prevent" and "promote" across a variety of health issues and situations often are rhetorical in nature; that is, they center on persuasive strategies and messages intended to move people from words to action. In his state-of-the-art review of health communication inquiry and health promotion, Gary Kreps (2015) notes that "Communication scholarship has made major contributions to promoting public health over the last 50 years" (p. 4). Despite the wide array of interdisciplinary experts equipped to study persuasive communication, according to Kreps, investigation into the strategies used to promote public health goals has thus far largely only "attracted media scholars concerned with the development, implementation, and evaluation of communication campaigns to prevent major health risks and promote public health" (p. 4). Now may be a particularly exigent moment for RHM scholars to join the public health effort. With the increased access to and speed of information due to the internet and mobile technologies, an increased exigency exists to understand more fully the persuasive dimensions and capabilities of communication practices related to public health.

A rhetorical orientation toward the study, practices, and communication of public health emphasizes how language helps to create, organize, challenge, and fragment public health realities. "If Public Health professionals can be viewed as rhetors, the effectiveness of their work, as evinced in their writing and speaking, derives from their ability to convey information persuasively to an audience, convincing people that what they have to say is worth considering, and motivating people to change behavior" (Clark & Fischbach, 2008, pp. 20–21). Indeed, much of public health work depends on the persuasive aspects and the effectiveness of discourse, and a number of studies have demonstrated that policy communication substantially influences experiences of health and illness. In particular, scholars have articulated the rhetorical quality of health policy debate, have demonstrated the material consequence of public policy language, and have suggested that the sociocultural context determines the range of discursive opportunities available to public officials who seek to amass particular kinds of public response. To this end, Robert Asen (2010) has claimed that "the process of policymaking foregrounds the role of rhetoric as a constitutive force" (p. 129). With direct connections to debates about the material consequences of rhetoric, RHM scholars now argue the relationship between rhetoric and material reality is both evident and critical to the politics of public health. Providing two more recent cases in point, Jennifer Scott et al. (2015) considers how the material realities of the 2014 Ebola outbreak were revealed, concealed, ignored, or exacerbated in calls to develop a new vaccine, and the recent work in RHM by Heidi Lawrence (2018) underscores the importance of rhetoric to ongoing considerations of conversations about vaccine hesitancy.

What the first year of RHM illustrates is that much of the work done by rhetoricians of health and medicine intervenes in pubic conversations either implicitly or explicitly. And when it comes to matters of rhetorical public(s) and the connection to health, more work remains to be done around the concept of "the public" as a linguistic and practical commonplace. Thus, this special issue brings into...