“Bounding Biomedicine deepens our understanding of how the borders between mainstream and complementary and alternative medicine are drawn and redrawn and illuminates the complex roles that competing forms of evidence play in that process. This book will be of interest to medical professionals, scholars, and practitioners alike.”

Lisa Keränen, author of Scientific Characters: Rhetoric, Politics, and Trust in Breast Cancer Research

“This innovative book is sure to attract readers from the humanities and social sciences as well as health and medicine. Derkatch weaves together an impressive amount of evidence to support her arguments. Yet she does so in a way that does not overwhelm the reader. Rather, her argument unfolds in such a way that to read this book is more like reading a compelling story that subtly, almost imperceptibly, changes the reader’s worldview along the way. This is rhetorical analysis at its finest, and this manuscript suggests a promising future trajectory for the burgeoning subfield of health and medical rhetoric.”

Amy Koerber, author of Breast or Bottle: Contemporary Controversies in Infant-Feeding Policy and Practice

“Derkatch’s Bounding Biomedicine is a valuable rhetorical analysis of how the boundary between conventional and alternative medicine has been drawn, patrolled, and renegotiated. Focusing on the moment in 1998 when the Journal of the American Medical Association and its eleven associated journals published special issues on complementary and alternative medicine, Bounding Biomedicine offers a deeply textured account of how two incommensurable frames of medical practice met. Derkatch’s book sets a new standard for research in medical rhetoric.”

Susan Wells, author of Our Bodies, Ourselves and the Work of Writing

“Bounding Biomedicine makes a groundbreaking methodological contribution to the rhetoric of health and medicine through its innovative variation of a rhetorical-cultural approach. In the process of examining a contextualized historical moment of boundary negotiation from multiple perspectives, Derkatch shows how rhetorical analysis can be culturally informed and multiangled, but also focused and fıne-grained.”

J. Blake Scott | Rhetoric & Public Affairs

“This book is a critical contribution to the body of scholarship on rhetorics of science, and it is an especially significant addition to the growing subfield of health and medical rhetorics.”

Rhetoric Review

“Derkatch is asking questions that anyone assessing medicine, research, and rhetoric should be asking. She encourages the reader’s critical thinking with her tone; she prods her readers to define ‘medicine’ and thus expand their own perspective on care, wellness, illness, disease, evidence and medical rhetoric. Perhaps by transparently addressing the pre-existing boundaries of biomedicine, practitioners can bridge the differences and build respect and resolution between the overlapping fields of biomedicine and CAM.”

Medical History