Book excerpt: Now in its fourth edition, Exploring Medical Anthropology provides a concise and engaging introduction to medical anthropology. It presents competing theoretical perspectives in a balanced fashion, highlighting points of conflict and convergence. Concrete examples and the author’s personal research experiences are utilized to explain some of the discipline’s most important insights, such as that biology and culture matter equally in the human experience of disease and that medical anthropology can help to alleviate human suffering. The text has been thoroughly updated for the fourth edition, including fresh case studies and a new chapter on drugs. It contains a range of pedagogical features to support teaching and learning, including images, text boxes, a glossary, and suggested further reading.