Patient Sense

“Patient Sense reveals the contours of medicine as it’s actually practiced in the twenty-first century, with all of its attendant tools. Campbell’s focus on healthcare practitioners and their working conditions provides a sorely needed new dimension of materiality to the field.” —Jenell Johnson, author of Every Living Thing: The Politics of Life in Common

“Patient Sense provides a compelling, timely exploration of the ways that new technologies have impacted health practitioner training and practice. Campbell expertly demonstrates that rhetorical body work and patient sense are more important now than ever.” —Emma Bedor Hiland, author of Therapy Tech: The Digital Transformation of Mental Healthcare

Technological innovations are rapidly changing the healthcare landscape. When nurses can complete portions of their clinical hours in virtual simulations and medical assistants might spend their entire careers providing patient care mediated by a screen, their understandings of their professional roles change. For future providers, rhetoric is at the heart of learning to communicate with patients and reframing their understandings of expertise.

In Patient Sense, Lillian Campbell introduces a theory of rhetorical body work and applies it to three distinct healthcare contexts: clinical nursing simulations, physical therapy labs, and tele-observation in a virtual intensive care unit. Drawing on sociological frameworks, she defines rhetorical body work as paid physical, emotional, or discursive labor performed at the material or technological interface of worker–client bodies. Such work is devalued within social and institutional systems and often gendered and racialized. Campbell captures the value of providers’ intuitive patient sense in the face of increasingly technology-mediated healthcare and intervenes in conversations about the future of healthcare training. Ultimately, she demonstrates that we will always need responsive healthcare providers whose rhetorical body work and patient sense cannot be replaced by technicians or algorithms.

Lillian Campbell is Associate Professor of English at Marquette University. Her research and teaching focus on rhetorics of health and medicine, feminist rhetorics, and professional and technical writing, as well as the impact of technology on how we communicate and learn.

Contents

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments

Introduction     The New Healthcare Landscape
Chapter 1     Rhetorical Body Work
Chapter 2     A Feeling for the Robot: Embodying Empathy in Nursing Simulations
Chapter 3     More Than a Massage: Body Work as Boundary-Work in a Physical Therapy Lab
Chapter 4     Reaching through the Screen: Mediated Body Work in a Virtual Intensive Care Unit
Conclusion     Body Matters for the Future of Healthcare and Technology

Appendix 1     Nursing Simulation Interview Questions
Appendix 2     Physical Therapy Interview Questions
Appendix 3     Tele-Observation Interview Questions
Works Cited
Index