Antoinette Polito Article

Context:

During the spring semester of my junior year, covering stories about the School of Health Sciences at Elon became my new beat at the Office of Communications. In doing so, one of the first stories I chose to focus on highlighted Antoinette Polito: a PA Professor who maintained a special focus on the integration between medicine and humanities and presented medical research in London during the spring of 2025.

Rhetorical Strategies

This article inherently required a lot of context for the audience to fully grasp its content and purpose. Being that it followed a professor in the health sciences department journey in presenting medical research with a humanities perspective, I asked vivid and specific questions during the interview to Antoinette to get the full context of where her head was at when she began the research, and what specifically inspired her (which she explained was the medieval french story and the danish fable). Additionally, I incorporated the most relevant quotes that emphasized the intersection between medicine and humanities and how Polito utilizes this in her classroom teachings. It communicated rhetorically the need for these two topics to intersect in the classroom in order to increase empathy and humanity for student who will eventually work in the health-care field.

Reflection:

I enjoyed interviewing Professor Polito for this article as I was able to understand the intersection between science and culture on a much deeper level. The research paper she completed that discussed a medieval story of medicine made contemporary references to David Bowie, showing Polito’s inherent rhetorical and situational awareness, as she was presenting this research to folks in the UK. The emphasis she has on including critical thinking, literature and the humanities as a whole in her medical courses is something I believe is necessary and beneficial to students in the healthcare field. Additionally, I learned that completing professional projects in which I possess a personal stake (as a member of the humanities field) and general interest leads me to having even better conversations than initially planned in my scheduled interviews. Its calls like those where it begins to feel less like an interview and more like a candid, enjoyable and fluid conversation that I feel myself developing as a journalist and placing myself in the shoes of a curious observer, rather than a rigid inquirer.