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Rhetoric of Medicine

Abstract

Office: 3G20 Office Hours: By Appointment COURSE DESCRIPTION Medicine is one of the oldest and most respected professions. It plays an integral part in one form or another in virtually every society on the planet today. Given its centrality in our lives and given the enormous expenditures that go to support it, it is only fitting that medicine should be taken seriously by the humanities. What, then, does a discipline like rhetoric have to say about medicine? How can we use rhetoric to investigate the history, practice, and culture of the medical profession? What insights can rhetoric offer when combined with other fields, such as philosophy, sociology, and anthropology about discourses of health? In this course, we will explore the rhetoric of medicine, examining the role of language, performance, ethics, and power. The aim is to cultivate a critical humanistic perspective on a profession that exercises so much power and authority over our daily lives, and to understand the place of medicine in the modern social imaginary. 3. Sontag, Susan. Illness as metaphor and AIDS and its metaphors. Macmillan, 2001. 4. Selected articles available through UW library databases and online.