Rhetorical Ethos in Health and Medicine: Patient Credibility, Stigma, and Misdiagnosis

This book explores rhetorical ethos and its ongoing role in patients’ credibility and in misdiagnoses stemming from gender, race and class-based biases. Drawing on the concept of ethos as a theoretical framework, it explores health and mental illness across different conditions and across different methodological approaches.

Extending work on ethos in clinical encounters and public discourse about biomedicine and presenting new research on the rhetoric of mental health, stigma and mental ill...