The medical understanding of the human body is related to how societies view life and health. This course investigates early modern medical approaches to the body in their social and cultural contexts and explores the relationship between bodies, medicine, and society. On the one hand, we will study how the body was represented in social, cultural, political, and religious settings. On the other hand, we will analyze how medical knowledge and practice both reflected and shaped beliefs, knowledge, and values about the human body. We will also examine how focusing on the body allows us to broaden the realms of historical actors who participated in the making of medical and natural knowledge. We shall consider topics such as medical understandings of bodies and their implications; sex and gender configurations; bodily management and disability; slavery and racial idioms; divine and demonic possessions; visual and material embodiments; anatomy and bodily mapping; bodies, healing, and magic; the relationship between medical and bodily knowledge, and between bodies and selves.