Abstract
In Patient Sense (2025), Lillian Campbell, a rhetoric scholar, examines embodied practices among workers in three allied health professions: nursing, physical therapy, and tele-observation. She argues that new forms of technological mediation lead to new sensory and affective modes of working with patients. Scholars of work and occupations interested in embodied learning and new technologies will find the book to be of interest.
Campbell argues that examining the embodied rhetoric, work, and materiality in these settings matters. This is an important argument, but I question its novelty. Perhaps this is disciplinary; my work lives at the intersection of anthropology and science studies, and I cannot speak for the field of rhetoric. Campbell also argues that scholars ought to study fewer physicians and more practitioners engaged in other areas of care. I agree wholeheartedly.
The first of the book's three empirical chapters examines manikin-based simulations for teaching nursing. As Campbell demonstrates, the manikin at the center of the simulation is one component of a larger technological system that, most importantly, includes an instructor speaking as the patient. The chapter shows how the simulation setup frames the interaction. An information sheet provides a mock patient chart that can include contextual clues, such as race or gender. The chapter also reveals how planned or accidental disruptions of the simulation give students opportunities for reflection. Students learn the embodied and discursive moves of more experienced nurses. By documenting the relations that develop between student and manikin-with-instructor, Campbell shows that these simulations can effectively teach technical and communication skills.
The chapter on training in physical therapy focuses on boundary work PT students do to prepare themselves for a profession that involves touching patients. She argues that PT training, including stories instructors tell, teaches students how to manage the intimacy of touch and gendered assumptions about bodies. She also focuses on PT's struggles for legitimacy within the world of biomedicine. Campbell argues that boundary work, in addition to being textual, can also involve physical delineation of professional and expert boundaries.
The chapter on tele-observation examines workers, most of whom have prior professional medical experience, who use video cameras to watch and interact with at-risk patients. Campbell makes the important observation that this work could not easily be moved offshore or automated because the tangle of embodied, experiential, and affective experiences would be difficult to pull apart. She also shows how workers learn to observe patients’ bodies for signs of distress and to use their own words and tone of voice to effect change, a process I have called “mutual articulation” (Prentice, 2013) of patient and practitioner bodies.
The book provides a nice introduction to the physical, emotional, and educational work being done at these sites. I would have liked to see deeper ethnographic engagement and more connections between informants’ understandings and Campbell's analyses. The lack of ethnographic depth reveals some missed opportunities. First, she argues that the study of body work “situates specific embodied learning and practices within economic networks of exchange” (8). Yet, nowhere does she examine these networks, something that could have been achieved with more engagement with specific informants and their lives. Second, some analyses appear disconnected from informants’ work of meaning making. To give one example, in an autoethnographic moment, Campbell gets recruited as a “patient,” receiving a massage from a student named Dan. She tells him that the massage feels “tingly,” then realizes that her statement could be misconstrued and tries to explain herself. Dan does not seem to understand. She says the moment reinforces the delicacy of bodily relations in these settings, but she never follows up with Dan and what he took away from the interaction. Similarly, third, she discusses tele-observers’ beliefs about their interactions with floor nurses without ever talking with them. We only have observers’ beliefs about nurses’ resistance or acceptance of their role.
The conclusion calls for rhetoric scholars to take on the embodied and material aspects of the situations they study. “All three cases demonstrate how rhetorical body work emerges at an intersection between field-specific knowledge and embodied practices, challenging any assumptions that we can address these two components independently” (163). While I wholly support this claim, it feels like something of a straw man. Perhaps this is disciplinary, but sociologists, anthropologists, and science studies scholars have focused on the relations among discourse, embodiment, and materiality for decades. Almost forty years ago, Shoshana Zuboff (1988) showed how new information technologies contain both liberatory and oppressive opportunities for workplaces. Campbell effectively examines what happens when students in allied health professions learn and practice with new technologies. A deeper ethnographic engagement might have provided more opportunities to explore the promise and perils of these technologies for education and the workplace.
