Charles L. Briggs examines and challenges the long-standing foundational concepts in the communication of health care to work toward more just and equitable medical futures.
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction 1
Part I: Philosophical Dialogues in Search of Incommunicability
1. The Incommunicable Menance Lurking within Locke’s Charter for Communicability 29
2. W. E. B. Du Bois: Incommunicability and/as the Veil 41
3. Frantz Fanon: Doctors, Tarzan, and the Colonial Inscription of Incommunicability 53
4. Georges Canguilhem and the Clinical Production of Incommunicability 71
Part II: How Incommunicability Shapes Entanglements of Language and Medicine
5. Biocommunicable Labor and the Production of Incommunicability in “Doctor-Patient Interaction” 81
6. Health Communication: How In/communicabilities Jump Scale 109
Interlude: Social Movements and Incommunicability-Free Zones 149
Part III: Communicable Contours of the COVID-19 Pandemic
7. Pandemic Ecologies of Knowledge: In Defense of COVID-19 Conspiracy Theories, Sort of 161
8. Pandemic Ecologies of Care 197
Conclusion 265
Notes 275
References 283
Index 307