The article examines the career of the little studied James-Edward Ruffier, a physician who won commercial success as well as political and popular renown as a physical culturist and natural health practitioner in France in the first half of the twentieth century. In particular, it focuses on the importance of writing for Ruffier’s business model. Writing across a range of genres, largely in self-published periodical titles, became a way to turn subscribers into clients. But in more diffuse ways it was also a bid to achieve broader social influence. The article identifies the rhetorical and performative strategies at the heart of this process, strategies that show that Ruffier was bringing to bear far more than his technical medical knowledge in the attempt to persuade the general public of the merits of his approach to life. It also seeks to situate Ruffier’s relationship to writing within the broader history of the ‘physician-writer’ in Third Republican France (1870-1940). Ruffier was one of many such figures, whose career trajectories have much to tell us about more general themes, including the medicalization of body culture in this period and the processes by which doctors acquired the kind of cultural authority that made them trusted voices on a range of issues within and beyond medicine.

中文翻译：

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修辞、企业和专业权威：James-Edward Ruffier 博士和 20 世纪法国的医师作家

这篇文章考察了研究较少的 James-Edward Ruffier 的职业生涯，他是 20 世纪上半叶在法国赢得商业成功以及政治和大众声誉的体育学家和自然健康从业者。特别是，它侧重于写作对于 Ruffier 的商业模式的重要性。跨多种体裁写作，主要是自己出版的期刊，成为将订阅者转变为客户的一种方式。但以更分散的方式，这也是为了获得更广泛的社会影响力。这篇文章确定了这个过程的核心的修辞和表演策略，这些策略表明 Ruffier 在试图说服公众相信他的生活方式的优点时，所带来的不仅仅是他的技术医学知识。它还试图将鲁菲耶与写作的关系置于第三共和法国（1870-1940）更广泛的“医师-作家”历史中。Ruffier 是众多这样的人物之一，他的职业轨迹可以告诉我们更多更普遍的主题，包括这一时期身体文化的医学化，以及医生获得文化权威的过程，使他们在一系列的声音中成为可信赖的声音医学内外的问题。