I teach courses in history and theory of rhetoric; rhetoric of science and technology; and rhetoric of health and medicine.  My primary research is in rhetoric of health and medicine.  My attention has been focussed, especially, on persuasive elements in professional and public discourses on pain; pharmaceuticals; breast cancer; “female sexual dysfunction”; mental health; and age/ageism.

My essays appear in rhetoric journals, interdisciplinary health and STS journals, and medical journals—and in essay collections across disciplines as well. I am author of Health and the Rhetoric of Medicine (Southern Illinois University Press, 2005). I have been a member of the President’s International Advisory Committee of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, a Distinguished Scholar at the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies, and a recipient of a Killam Teaching Prize. I am a faculty member in the Science and Technology Graduate Studies Program.

Selected Publications

• “The Rhetoric of Depression: Listening to Listening to Prozac in a Pandemic.” Rhetoric of Health and Medicine 6, 1 (2023): 9-35.
• “The Rhetoric and Politics of American Ageism: Notes from a Pandemic.” In Martin Halliwell and Sophie A. Jones, eds., The Edinburgh Companion to the Politics of American Health. Edinburgh University Press, 2022. 476-491.
• “Foreword.” In Lisa Melonçon et al, eds. Rhetoric of Health and Medicine As/Is. The Ohio State University Press, 2020. vii-xiii.
• “Ageism and Rhetoric.” In Alan Bleakley, ed.  The Routledge Handbook of Medical Humanities. Routledge, 2020. 163-175.
• “The Empowered Patient on a Historical-Rhetorical Model: 19th-Century Patent-Medicine Ads and the 21st-Century Health Subject.” health: An Interdisciplinary Journal for the Social Study of Health, Illness, and Medicine 24,5 (2020) 572-588.
• “Sex, Drugs, and Rhetoric: The Case of Flibanserin for ‘Female Sexual Dysfunction.’” Social Studies of Science48, 4 (2018): 459-482.
• “The Rhetoric of Female Sexual Dysfunction: Faux Feminism and the FDA. Canadian Medical Association Journal187, 12 (8 September 2015): 915-916.
• “The View from Here and There: Objectivity and the Rhetoric of Breast Cancer.” In Flavia Padovani, Jonathan Tsou, and Alan Richardson, eds., Objectivity in Science: Approaches to Historical Epistemology. Dordrecht: Springer, 2015. 211-226.
• “Suffering and the Rhetoric of Care.” In Michael Hyde and James Herrick, eds., After the Genome: The Language of Our Biotechnological Future. Waco: Baylor University Press, 2013. 219-234.
• Blake Scott, Judy Z. Segal, and Lisa Keränen. “Rhetoric of Health and Medicine: Inventional Possibilities for Scholarship and Engaged Practice.” Poroi: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Rhetoric Analysis and Invention. 9,1 (2013).
• Breast Cancer and Its Narration: An Accidental Study.” Literature and Medicine30, 2 (2012): 292-318.
• “The Sexualization of the Medical. Journal of Sex Research 49, 4 (2012): 269-278.
• “What, in Addition to Drugs, Do Pharmaceutical Ads Sell?”: The Rhetoric of Pleasure in Direct-to-Consumer Advertising for Prescription Pharmaceuticals.” In Deborah Dysart-Gale and Joan Leach, eds. Rhetorical Questions of Health and Medicine. Lanham, MD: Lexington Press, 2011. 9-32.
• Miriam Solomon, Wm Young, Judy Segal and Stephanie Geiger. “Medication Adaptation Headache.” Cephalalgia31, 5 (2011): 515-517.