Disease

the phenomenological and conceptual center of practical-clinical medicine

Per Sundström

pp. 109-126

in: Toombs (ed), Handbook of phenomenology and medicine, Berlin, Springer, 2001

Abstract

In an ordinary English dictionary, chosen at random, you may read: "Someone who is ill is suffering from a disease or health problem which makes them unable to work or to live normally" (Collins, 1987, p. 721). Such a down-to-earth explication of illness says little or nothing about how it feels to fall, and to be, ill. And it does not tell you anything about that forbidding existential fact which infects any serious illness: being ill, seriously ill, is being lost and trapped in your self, your own weak self, which finds itself bereft of a world to care for and inhabit, and so unable to care for anything or anyone except itself, i.e., your self, which confines you to itself-your petty self.