Ann Folwell Stanford shows how Leslie Marmon Silko uses bodies and body parts as symbols of an unruly society in Almanac of the Dead: A Novel. Drawing on Mayan beliefs and prophecies as well as on contemporary social realities, Silko probes medicine's entanglements in the profit motive that make it simultaneously vulnerable and culpable. A characteristic Euro-American force inextricably linked to the oppression and domination of the have-nots, medicine becomes a governing image and one of the ideological engines behind this work.