Health, Illness, and Disease – Adjusting the Coordinates

Abstract

”Medicine is not concerned with illness and disease, but with suffering human beings called patients.” (Sadegh-Zadeh, p. 148) Rather than understanding the patient from illness, Kazem Sadegh-Zadeh takes the inverse trajectory. A comprehensive theory of the patients sheds light on the concepts of health, illness, and disease. In such a perspective disease is not the opposite of health, and needs to be construed as a nonclassical concept based on a number of prototype diseases. Dwelling upon Wittgenstein’s family resemblance theory and Eleanor Rosch’s theory of categorization, Sadegh-Zadeh’s theory of prototype diseases allows for gradual membership in the category of diseases. The boundary of diseases and non-diseases thus becomes blurry and is construed as a matter of social definition depending on the cultural context. Such a social construction of disease reorients the basic coordinates of the philosophy of medicine. This paper will track the way the coordinates are reoriented and test them from perspectives at the edge respectively critical to orthodox medicine such as Arthur Kleinman’s medical anthropology and Michel Foucault’s archeology of medical institutions.