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

Charles L. Briggs is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. He is coauthor of Tell Me Why My Children Died: Rabies, Indigenous Knowledge, and Communicative Justice, also published by Duke University Press.