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From its beginning medical anthropology was defined as “…the cross-cultural study of medical systems and … the bioecological and sociocultural factors that influence the incidence of health and disease now and throughout human history” (Foster and Anderson 1978:1). Thus, it has long had a broad mandate to understand and interpret human beings – their behavior, their diseases and illnesses, their medical systems and the place of each of these in the encompassing sociocultural system (Erickson 2003). Medical anthropology was professionalized as a subfield within the discipline in the 1960s. At 60 years of age, it has a history of both venerated founders (George Foster, Cecil Helman, Arthur Kleinman, Charles Leslie, Hazel Weidman, Charles Hughes, Benjamin Paul, Pertti and Gretel Pelto, Arthur Rubel, among many others) and contested theoretical paradigms that have followed broader theoretical shifts in the discipline. There are now a range of medical anthropology journals and programs around the world, some hosted within anthropology departments, and others in interdisciplinary fields, such as global health.