Much has been said about bodies, yet the body still remains one of the most contested concepts in fields such as anthropology, art, history, literature, medicine, philosophy, religion, and gender/sexuality. In *An Essay Concerning Human Understanding* (1689), John Locke noted that all "are born into the world, being surrounded by bodies that perpetually and diversely affect them." By conceptualizing the world as one of bodies in contact, his assertion prefaced a growing eighteenth-century preoccupation with corporeality. This panel seeks to explore such investigations of the body by examining how these figures wrote about and experienced bodies, health, illness, contagion, mixture, and death.