Abstract

This chapter explores concepts of health and disease at the crossroads of philosophy, history, and social science. Beginning with a discussion of how these concepts have important consequences in our everyday lives, it examines various holistic conceptions of health and healing; the tension between biomedical and normative conceptions of health and disease; and the special challenge posed by mental illness. Then, with a focus on the rise of narrative medicine and the recent distinction between “disease” and “illness,” it considers how we might think about health and disease in the twenty-first century.

INTRODUCTION

We all want to be healthy. Yet rarely, if ever, do we stop to ask why we want to be healthy or what we mean by health. As the French surgeon René Leriche (1879–1955) put it in 1936, “Health is life lived in the silence of the organs.” It is something we take for granted – until we lose it. Once the organs break their blissful silence, we want to know why we are feverish, exhausted, or in pain. That is, we are preoccupied with disease. Perhaps that is why medical thought and practice focus more on disease than on health. But, whatever the reasons, health is more desired than understood. And disease is discussed more than health.