“In the course during the fall semester 2001, I realized that I wanted to be a doctor precisely because I wanted to better understand people’s stories of illness.” Twenty-five years after Amy Saltzman Porter ’05 sat in Medical Anthropology for the first time, she joined — via Zoom — a celebration of the course that changed her life. She was not alone. On April 22, 2026, the last day of the spring semester, students, instructors, and collaborators gathered in Aaron Burr Hall to mark 25 years of “Medical Anthropology at Princeton” (ANT 240/HUM 240).
The course has been taught continuously since spring 2001 by Professor João Biehl in the Department of Anthropology, and cross-listed with the Humanities Council’s Program in Humanistic Studies in recent years. Medical anthropology had been taught at Princeton in the 1990s by Vincanne Adams, who went on to join the faculty at UCSF. When Biehl arrived in 2001, he redesigned the course from the ground up — building it around ethnographic fieldwork, biosocial theory, community-engaged research, and storytelling — and has taught it ever since.
The celebration brought together members of the course’s earliest cohorts alongside its 25th, a testament to a class that has shaped how generations of Princeton students understand illness, medical science, care, and inequality — launching careers in medicine, public health, anthropology, entrepreneurship, law, policy, journalism, and the arts.
Read more about ANT 240 / HUM 240 on the Department of Anthropology website.
