Incommunicable Toward Communicative Justice in Health and Medicine

"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