Access to medical care, definitions of health and healing, and norms and expectations related to the body have become politicized and reconfigured in seemingly endless ways. Determinations about who is eligible and for what type of care often correlates with measures of equity, social justice, and the overall health of a given population. As epidemic and pandemic threats and new pharmaceutical products dominate medical discourse, social determinants of health and well-being reveal the extent to which a state’s control over various nonmedical factors shapes the conditions under which people live, work, grow, and age, enabling or preventing adverse health effects. We will explore questions concerning suffering and pain, medicine’s role in shaping certain kinds of subjects, the inseparability of medicine and politics, and the relationship between government infrastructure and forms of health. How are state and health care regimes connected? Other questions we will investigate together include: how do we define health, sickness, disease, illness, and the body? What role do social or structural forces play in shaping or determining measures of health both individual and collective? How do we account for disparities in health, and what kinds of intersectional frameworks might we use to analyze the ways race, gender, sexuality, and disability create or contribute to inequitable health outcomes? Upon completion of this course, students will have the ability to understand and articulate concepts, theories, and perspectives from multiple fields of study (including medical anthropology and related disciplines); apply ethical reasoning in order to analyze how social, economic, and political systems interact with individual or group identities or experiences within particular cultural and historical contexts; and refine their research and writing skills to effectively outline an argument that aligns with, or challenges, personally or collectively held values, beliefs, and responsibilities.