The introduction draws on work by Black feminist writers, especially Hortense Spillers and Savannah Shange, and the indigenous ethnographer Audra Simpson to launch an analysis of how models of communication and medicine have been embedded in colonialism, white supremacy, and racism for three hundred years. It proposes a shift from using notions of communicability, which model discourse and pathogens as inherently mobile, to tracing how they construct white, elite, nondisabled European men as the communicative and medical norm and depict others, especially racialized populations, as incommunicable, as incapable of communicating rationally or internalizing biomedical concepts and practices. It analyzes the subdisciplining of anthropology as work by linguistic and medical anthropologists is generally segregated by competing concepts, journals, professional associations, and graduate-training tracks and highlights authors who bridge this divide.