Health

two idolatries

Pascal Ide

pp. 55-85

in: Paulina Taboada, Kateryna Fedoryka, Patricia Donohue-White (eds), Person, society and value, Berlin, Springer, 2002

Abstract

It has become classical to oppose two conceptions of health, in relation to two types of medical practices, or even two approaches to the human body. Simplifying, I shall call the first conception objectivist and the second one naturalist,² epithets that will become clear later. The different terms available in English to designate a state of unhealth allow me to give a hint at this distinction. The English language has three different terms whose meanings are quite distinct and which can be contrasted with the poverty of French's single term maladie.³ In English, disease refers to the malady as it is apprehended by medicine; illness signifies the malady as experienced by the patient; sickness suggests a state of malaise rather than of malady or, more precisely, a social representation of the malady, if one follows Jean Benoist's analysis of the American contributions to the anthropology of health and disease.⁴