Chemistry in the mail: Stamps from around the globe and public science communication in the twentieth century.

Postage stamps are designed to convey messages that reverberate symbolically with broad swaths of the public, and their content has been employed as a window into how members of the public understand the ideas represented therein. In this rhetorical analysis, we analyze Philadelphia's Science History Institute's Witco Stamp Collection, which features 430 stamps from countries around the globe dating from 1910 to 1983, to identify how chemistry is portrayed in this ubiquitous medium. We find the vernacular of science reflected and supported by these images functions to (a) define chemistry in terms of its invisibility and abstraction; (b) uphold chemical operations as instrumental and daedal, or exceptional, in nature; and (c) delineate practitioners of chemistry as-on the whole-privileged and preternatural. Our findings reveal some of the overarching communicative tools made available to twentieth-century non-experts for articulating chemistry as an enterprise and reveal how those tools positioned chemistry in terms of values related to opacity and exclusivity.

Medicalization's Communicative Infrastructure: Seventy Years of "Brain Chemistry" in the New York Times.

Medicalization theory aims to delineate how and why non-medical issues become demarcated within the realm of medical jurisdiction. The theory postulates that medicalization is marked by diagnostic naming, medical expertise, technological standardization and the de-contextualization of experiential knowledge, and that it is driven by popular media and lay discourse as much as by the communication of health professionals and medical institutions. Although medicalization has been recognized as an inherently rhetorical act, medicalization theory does not attend to the specific communicative means undergirding its orchestration. Drawing from medicalized New York Times coverage of the phrase "brain chemistry" (N = 71), we address this theoretical aperture, identifying through rhetorical analysis the most common communicative devices that emerged across 70 years of coverage and three distinct diagnoses (i.e., mental illness, addiction and overweight/obesity). Our findings reveal three central rhetorical means through which medicalization is communicated including mechanical metaphor, pedagogy of contrast, and moral enthymeme. By tracing content across time, the current study explicates the communicative infrastructure that gives rise to medicalization, thereby extending the literature from questions of why medicalization occurs and what its content is to how it is conveyed and imparted.