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The body is currently a subject of heated debate and controversy, yet much of the recent research on the body in the social sciences and humanities can be difficult to understand or hard to find without access to a research library. The concept of the body is one over and within which culture has written different moral commands, legal descriptions, medical accounts, psychiatric interventions, psychological theories, social pressures, religious laws, scientific divisions and institutional conventions.

John Soyland makes some of the debates about the body accessible through the examination of a range of topics: childbirth, death, sexuality, health, illness, madness, etiquette, body decoration, discipline, and the embodied self. This lively book shows how important it is to understand the body as surrounded and pervaded by the culture that affects its existence.