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Technology as the representative anecdote in popular discourses of health and medicine
1Department of Speech Communication and Theatre Arts, Minnesota State University, Moorhead 56563, USA.
Health Communication
|January 5, 2002
Abstract:
Using a Burkean framework (1969), this article approaches medical dramas as cultural texts to be read for dominant meanings of health and health care. Burke's representative anecdote illuminates the melding of science, technology, and healing in popular discourses of health, establishing technological intervention as the norm and marginalizing nontechnological (i.e., alternative) forms of health care. Popular entertainment reinforces this anecdote in narratives of healing as technological competence triumphing over nature.