Healthy or sick?—a lot follows from these. The search for health, the prevention and cure of illness, and the costs of health care have been major players in American cultural and political life. This course explores early phases of American’s approaches to health care in the first half of the semester, and modern and contemporary history in the second half. These paths of inquiry will include a variety of historical and cultural topics with connections to a range of other disciplinary fields, including the fate of American peoples during colonial contact, the relation of health care to Enlightenment and revolution, the democratic impulse to welcome diversity in markets of medical choices, the promise of reform in lifestyle and in laboratory investigation, the impact of Darwinian biology and of technological innovations, the terror of epidemics, the contributions of diverse ethnic groups and the cruelties imposed by dominant groups, the relation of health to natural forces and to human intervention, the merits and the limitations of materialist approaches to the body, the promise of alternative holistic models for viewing health and illness, the importance of public health, the relation of medicine to mass society and popular culture, the rise of the modern doctor and the demands of practice, the challenges of chronic and terminal illness, the growing costs of insurance, and the threats to health from environmental toxins.