This book is a concise and readable introduction to medical anthropology, drawn from the author's research on Peruvian shamanism and organ transplantation in the United States. The author uses this ethnographic material from South America and the U.S. to illustrate the points of the book. These points are: 1) that biology and culture matter equally in the human experience of disease, 2) that the political economy is a primary epidemiological factor, 3) that ethnography is an essential tool to understand human suffering due to disease, and 4) that medical anthropology can help to alleviate human suffering.