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Proponents of global market expansion claim that economic growth brings prosperity and creates a more equitable global society, yet these efforts may result in the exacerbation of economic disparities that translates into significant disparities in health. These trends underscore the importance of research examining the social determinants of health in an increasingly unequal world. This article brings together concepts from biocultural anthropology, developmental origins of health and disease, and research examining the long‐term effects of early environments on social capital to formulate the notion of biosocial inheritance. Biosocial inheritance is the process whereby social adversity in one generation is transmitted to the next through reinforcing biological and social mechanisms that impair health, exacerbating social and health disparities. Such a theoretical framework considers contemporary and historic political‐economic forces that shape inequalities in human health, across generations. We examine the biosocial determinants of growth in the Andes as a case study of biosocial inheritance, developing a model that will illuminate the contemporary and historic sources of persistent poverty in low‐income communities around the world. By highlighting the biosocial mechanisms underpinning the intergenerational transmission of poverty, this model allows for the formulation of interventions aimed at breaking the cycle of poverty and a reconsideration of the way we think about poverty and social mobility.

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Introduction -- Part One. Global Medicines in Local Cultures -- Chapter 1 Global Health Goals and Local Constraints in a Rural Peruvian Clinic -- Chapter 2 Science and Sanctity: Biomedicine and Christianity at an Ethiopian Hospital -- Chapter 3 The Cosmopolitan Hospital -- Chapter 4 "Dangerous Disease" Epilepsy in Asante -- Chapter 5 The Salience of the State in Biomedicine: Congo and Uganda Cases Compared -- Part Two. Care Giving and Hospital Labor -- Chapter 6 Creating a Therapeutic Community: Lessons from Allada Hospital Benin -- Chapter 7 Medical "Errands" among Women with Cervical Cancer in Guatemala -- Chapter 8 Routinized Caring or a "Call" to Nursing: Shifts in Hospital Nursing in Rukwa, Tanzania -- Chapter 9 "We Work with What We Have, Not with What We Would Like to Have" Hospital Care in Mexico -- Part Three. Hospitals and the Patient -- Chapter 10 The Navigation of Public Hospitals by West African Immigrants with Cancer in Paris, France -- Chapter 11 Each Child Is Unique: The Responsible U.S. Parent's Take on Hospital Care Gone Wrong -- Chapter 12 Making Ethnographic Sense of Cesarean Rates in Greek Public Hospitals -- Chapter 13 The Nightside of Medicine: Obstetric Suffering and Ethnographic Witnessing in a Pakistani Hospital -- Afterword -- References -- Notes on Contributors -- Index