This lecture course introduces upper-division undergraduates to the anthropological analysis of illness, health, healing and medicine. Our investigation will be comparative, examining how different systems of meaning and power make sense of bodily states, historically and cross-culturally. We will explore current and past medical anthropological approaches — political economic, phenomenological, symbolic, feminist, post-structuralist — in order to critically evaluate how well these frameworks convey the lived experience of bodies in their local worlds. The intellectual excitement of medical anthropology comes from its ability to challenge categories and boundaries that seem natural and fixed. Ultimately, my goal is for students to think differently about the embodied relations of health and affliction as produced through the natural “order of things”.