Health Humanities Baccalaureate Programs and the Rhetoric of Health and Medicine

ABSTRACT

This article argues that technical and professional communication (TPC) programs and specialists need to contribute more to health humanities scholarship and program curricula. The article reviews the writing courses offered by baccalaureate health humanities programs and “to support further TPC engagement in these programs” offers core generalizations and strategies for managing their approval process.

KEYWORDS:

• Curriculum design
• health/medical communication
• programmatic research

Notes

1. In this article, I consider RHM to be a field of inquiry drawing on multiple intellectual and disciplinary influences—primarily, technical communication and rhetoric. In so doing, I follow Scott and Meloncon’s (2017) lead in treating the rhetoric of health and medicine not as a discipline, per se, but as a “field of inquiry guided by rhetoric but shaped by and drawing upon a range of disciplinary and interdisciplinary bodies of scholarship” (p. 3).

2. The Flexner Report (1910), commissioned by the Carnegie Foundation, is often cited as the primary provocation for the medical humanities as a formal movement (1) because it identified inadequacies in American medical training, in the areas of scientific (specifically, biomedical) and clinical training and (2) because it recommended a major overhaul in the way doctors were educated.

3. Meloncon and Henschel’s “Of Horsemen and Layered Literacies” (2014) is an excellent comprehensive survey of the potential benefits of TPC pedagogies and curricula. It extends prior work (Allen & Benningholff, 2004; Cargile Cook, 2002; Dayton & Berhardt, 2004; Johnson-Eilola, 1996; Lanier, 2009; Meloncon, 2008; Pringle & Williams, 2005; Rainey, Turner, & Dayton, 2005; Reich, 1992; Society of Technical Communication, 2012) by integrating the myriad conceptual and practical skills TPC scholars have proposed ought to be the effect of well-designed TPC pedagogy and curricula into an explanatory matrix that “suggests what students should know and what they should learn in the [TPC] classroom” (p. 13).

4. Although there is some discussion in the broader literature (Bleakley, 2015) about the health humanities that makes a distinction between bioethics and the health humanities (noting that, especially in the United Kingdom and Europe, the intellectual trajectories and histories are overlapping in places but distinct in terms of publications and professional organizations), the Hiram Report (Berry & Lamb, 2016) counted programs that listed bioethics as their required course so long as there were additional humanities electives.

5. Our final committee consisted of six faculty from the following five programs/departments: Sociology and Anthropology (1), Social Work/Gerontology (1), Philosophy (1), Communication (1), and English (2).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Catherine C. Gouge

Catherine C. Gouge is an associate professor in the Department of English at West Virginia University. Her recent scholarship has appeared in Rhetoric Society Quarterly, the Journal of Technical Writing and Communication, and the Journal of Medical Humanities. Her research interests include rhetoric of health and medicine, science and technology studies, writing and editing pedagogy, and professional communication.