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Kenneth M Boyd is Senior Lecturer in Medical Ethics, Edinburgh University Medical School and Research Director, Institute of Medical Ethics.
Introduction
In this paper, I want to explore possible meanings of a cluster of words-disease, illness, sickness, health, healing and wholeness. Many people have tried to elucidate what these words mean, but agreed definitions are often elusive. In what follows I shall begin with some definitions of disease, illness and sickness. I shall then try to say why definitions of disease and health are so elusive; and I shall end with some observations on science and religion, in the light of which the difficulty of defining health, healing and wholeness may make some kind of sense.
Dictionary definitions
Dis-ease (from old French and ultimately Latin) is literally the absence of ease or elbow room. The basic idea is of an impediment to free movement. But nowadays the word is more commonly used without a hyphen to refer to a "disorder of structure or function in an animal or plant of such a degree as to produce or threaten to produce detectable illness or disorder"-or again, more narrowly, to "a definable variety of such a disorder, usually with specific signs or symptoms or affecting a specific location". That at least is how the New Shorter Oxford Dictionary 1 defines it, adding as synonyms: "(an) illness", "(a) sickness". Let me stay with the dictionary to see what it says about those synonyms.
Illness has three definitions. Two of them are of the way the word was used up to the 18th century-to mean either "wickedness, depravity, immorality", or "unpleasantness, disagreeableness, hurtfulness". These older meanings reflect the fact that the word "ill" is a contracted form of "evil". The third meaning, dating from the 17th century, is the modern one: "Ill health; the state of being ill". The dictionary defines "ill" in this third sense as "a disease, a sickness". Looking up "sickness" we find "The condition of being sick or ill; illness, ill health"; and under "sick" (a Germanic word whose ultimate origin is unknown, but may be onomatopoeic) we find "affected by illness, unwell, ailing ... not in a healthy state", and, of course, "having an inclination to vomit".
There is a rather unhelpful circularity about...