This multidisciplinary book provides the most accurate and most recent information on health and health care in the state of Mississippi. The editor and contributors explain why the state finds itself in precarious health conditions and reveal the prevailing circumstances as the state debates a path toward a comprehensive health care system for its citizens. They show who has had access to good health care and celebrate the heroes who struggled to provide health care to all Mississippians. The essays contribute to the debate on how the health care system might be restructured, reconstructed, or adjusted to meet the needs of all people, regardless of race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and national origin. The issue of health disparities and socioeconomic status leads to a relevant discussion of whether health and access to quality care are a right of all people, or the privilege of a few. The volume offers a clear understanding of health care trends in the state from the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries up to the present and the prospects of transcending the obstacles of its own creation over the past two centuries. It likewise highlights the economic challenges that Mississippi confronts and how wise and realistic its priorities are in meeting the needs of its diverse populations, particularly racial and ethnic minorities.