This book explores the trajectories of health and disease in the context of poverty, drawing on the concepts of affliction and suffering. Focusing on low-income neighborhoods in Delhi, it demonstrates the differential distribution of life chances and the surge of aspirations on the part of the poor for improvement in their material and social conditions. It considers the way in which people understand their illnesses and interact with health practitioners, along with the frequency of visits to the practitioners. It also examines the implications of medical technologies for kinship obligations; how practitioners with different kinds of training, including apprenticeship, see their own practices of healing; and how theories embedded in the everyday experiences of patients and healers might be made to speak critically to the expert discourses of global health.