A History of Rhetoric, Sound, and Health and Healing

A History of Rhetoric, Sound, and Health and Healing argues for medico-sonic knowledge - systematically interpreted bodily sounds with medical knowledge mediated by rhetoric - as an evolving corporeal practice with an incomparable, sprawling history.

Taking a materialist-feminist perspective, the book rhetorically accounts for sound and suggests rhetoric enables bodily sounds as understandable, knowable, and treatable with power to help and discipline bodies in health, healing, and hospital contexts. From an expansive, pan-historiographic approach integrated with and influenced by fieldwork from neonatal intensive care units (NICU) in Denmark and the United States, the author explores intentional and unintentional diagnostic, prognostic, and therapeutic uses of sound in contemporary Western biomedical health systems and promotes a new research concept and fieldwork practice, sound in all research.

The insightful, timely volume will interest students and researchers in the medical humanities, rhetoric and communication, health communication, sound studies, medical and allied health sciences, and research methods.

Kristin Marie Bivens is a scholar of the rhetoric of health and medicine and the head of education and training in the Department of Clinical Research at the University of Bern in Switzerland. She also leads the patient and public involvement program in clinical research.