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Medicine is a profession known for its ethical code of conduct—a code that is imbued with an ethos of neutrality and impartiality. However, real life shows us that doctors do not occupy a special moral class, but are rather members of social and political communities, citizens with grievances, political affiliations and loyalties, and are often subject to many social and political influences around them. This course will examine how doctors’ political choices shape their medical practice, and how their medical practice—especially their temporally and spatially privileged access to bodily suffering and loss of life—shapes in turn their political choices. It investigates the roles of doctors, not simply as technical experts, but as social and political actors informed by technical expertise among other factors. Relying on histories, ethnographies, memoirs and even works of fiction, this course will explore narratives of doctors’ social and political engagement in the US and around the globe.