The health of successive generations is shaped by changing social, technological, political and economic conditions. Social norms regarding healthy lives are also dynamic, diversely shaping aspirations. In addition to these collective transformations, people experience modifications in their own social and biological circumstances over their life course, and their personal health adjusts with aging. The life course perspective aims to address these changes in health and in society while possibly helping to understand how health inequalities endure. This chapter shows how the integration of the life course perspective into health and medical sociology opens renewed avenues for research, thanks to the expansion of theoretical propositions and the accumulation of quantitative and qualitative longitudinal data.