Title: PhD Candidate
University: University of North Carolina @ Chapel Hill
Email: jedwell@unc.edu
Twitter: @JK_Edwell
Description of your work
Currently, I am a sixth year PhD candidate at UNC-CH. Before starting my doctoral program, I completed a Masters in Theological Studies, and my background in religion fundamentally shapes who I am as an RHM scholar. My current research focuses on the intersection of religion, health/illness, and medicine. I am interested in how religious practices, beliefs, and communities influence individuals’ experience of the body as well as medical practices and knowledge. I am most intrigued by moments when, in the context of biomedicine, patients and healthcare providers employ religious language and/or engage in religious rituals.
In my dissertation project, entitled “Origin Stories: The Rhetorical Ecology of American Birth Medicine,” I uncover the religious ‘roots’ or antecedents of obstetric, pediatric, and neonatal medicine. Through archival research, I trace the development of American birth medicine in relation to shifting religious beliefs about nature, pain, womanhood/motherhood, and the figure of the newborn. Ultimately, I argue that Protestant rhetoric and values permeated the establishment of mainstream or “orthodox” birth medicine. By elaborating this influence, my project will contribute to research in RHM, Rhetoric of Religion, and the Medical/Health Humanities. In particular, I hope to demonstrate the value of rhetorical inquiry for bioethics, highlighting the implications of this historical convergence between religion and medicine for contemporary debates about birth and new life.