This new multimodal feature of the Rhetoric of Health and Medicine journal called “Physician Stories Archive” pairs RHM scholars with in-the-trenches practitioners whose stories challenge us to think beyond the theoretical and to consider things far outside our own disciplinary horizons. For this new feature, we thank the tenacious and exceptionally generous physician Dr. Damali Campbell Oparaji and her collaborator, the genre-trailblazing writing studies superstar and RHM scholar Jess Restaino, both for the idea and for contributing the first iteration of the new series. This interview follows the authors’ two-year, weekly conversation project, which they built on the relationship of collaboration around issues of reproductive justice they’d begun while serving together as board trustees for their regional Planned Parenthood affiliate. Dr. Campbell Oparaji is an obstetrician/gynecologist in an under-resourced hospital in an urban center. In their short conversation, she shares the story of a racist encounter with medical residents who were under her mentorship. Damali and Jess organized the interview, as they describe, “around a brief, focused series of questions that greatly simplify [Jess’s] role as interlocutor and bring into highly visible relief the story Damali decides to tell.” As the authors explain in their introduction to this new archive, what readers and viewers will get is “a snapshot of lived clinical experience which deserves centering and study, and which stands to disrupt some of the roots of our work in rhetoric of health and medicine.” Scholars interested in working to collect physicians’ stories for this project can write to rhm.journal.editors@gmail.com.
