ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the methodological implications of this burgeoning subfield of circulation studies, focusing especially on how an "ecological" tendency in this body of scholarship might resonate with the work of rhetoricians of health and medicine. It argues that ecological models have not yet yielded research methodologies that enable rhetoricians to adequately consider the complex material-semiotic infrastructures that are central to the study of circulating health and medical knowledge. While ecological models have complicated our atomized understandings of rhetoric and its contexts, they haven't helped us fully account for the distinct temporal and spatial logics that animate these contexts in particular times and places. The chapter examines the rhetoric of Emma Elizabeth Walker, a doctor whose "social hygiene" lectures aimed to distribute knowledge about sex and bodies to a lay public of girls and young women in the early 1900s.
