Incommunicable

Toward Communicative Justice in Health and Medicine

By: Charles L. Briggs

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Paperback | 19 April 2024

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336 Pages

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In Incommunicable Charles L. Briggs examines the long-standing presumptions that medical discourse translates easily across geographic, racial, and class boundaries. Bringing linguistic and medical anthropology into conversation with Black and decolonial theory, he theorizes the failure in health communication as incommunicability, which negatively affects all patients, doctors, and health care providers. Briggs draws on W. E. B. Du Bois and the work of three philosopher-physicians-John Locke, Frantz Fanon, and George Canguilhem-to show how cultural models of communication and health have historically racialized people of color as being incapable of communicating rationally and understanding biomedical concepts. He outlines incommunicability through a study of COVID-19 discourse, in which health professionals defined COVID-19 based on scientific medical knowledge in ways that reduced varieties of nonprofessional knowledge about COVID-19 to "misinformation" and "conspiracy theories." This dismissal of nonprofessional knowledge led to a failure of communication that eroded trust in medical expertise. Building on efforts by social movements and coalitions of health professionals and patients to craft more just and equitable futures, Briggs helps imagine health systems and health-care discourses beyond the oppressive weight of communicability and the stigma of incommunicability.

Industry Reviews

"In Incommunicable, Charles L. Briggs provokes readers to consider a deeper understanding of the political, cultural, and economic structurings over the long term of medicine, biomedical science, and global health as well as how these structurings set the grounds for their deconstruction and failure. Language and suffering, meaning and treatment, channel power to reshape health and disease and biomedical science so as to reproduce inequality. Briggs powerfully shows how this works. A book of real importance!" -- Arthur Kleinman, Harvard University
"Kudos to Charles L. Briggs for his compelling account of health officials' failure to communicate with the public. From COVID-19 to cholera outbreaks, critical medical information is 'incommunicable' to laypeople and communities with mounting health problems. The book is a heartbreaker, as clinicians fail again and again to listen to patients' perspectives, and the 'ruptures of understanding' illness and death widen." -- Elinor Ochs, Distinguished Research Professor, University of California, Los Angeles

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