Incommunicable

In Incommunicable, Charles L. Briggs questions the long-held assumption that medical discourse travels easily across geographic, racial and class lines. He brings linguistic and medical anthropology together with Black and decolonial theory to describe failures in health communication as incommunicability, a problem that harms patients, doctors and other health care providers alike.

Briggs turns to W. E. B. Du Bois and to three philosopher-physicians, John Locke, Frantz Fanon and George Canguilhem. Through them he shows how cultural models of communication and of health have historically cast people of color as unable to communicate rationally or to grasp biomedical concepts.

His main case is the discourse around COVID-19. Health professionals defined the disease through scientific medical knowledge and, in doing so, reduced many kinds of nonprofessional knowledge about it to misinformation and conspiracy theories. Briggs argues that this dismissal produced a breakdown in communication that wore away trust in medical expertise.

The book then builds on the work of social movements and of coalitions of health professionals and patients who are trying to create more just and equitable futures. It uses that work to imagine health systems and health-care discourse that are free from the burden of communicability and the stigma of incommunicability.