4 - Ideas of health and illness

Summary

The bulk of this study is an examination of how Huli individuals interpret the range of illnesses to which they are exposed, and how they select between the various means available to alleviate these ills. But it is first necessary to examine the general categories that we must use in a discussion of these issues in order to isolate the range of meanings that they have for us, and so their relevance to Huli usage. The basic terms in a study of this sort are ‘health’, ‘illness’ and ‘disease’. I therefore deal with these first.

Health

The word ‘health’ has in English a range of meanings. We may say that someone is ‘in good health’, ‘healthy for his age’ or that his ‘health is broken’. One component of our idea of health is the absence of disease, but health is not simply this. An otherwise vigorous person might still regard himself as healthy despite a sprain, or what he senses to be a passing respiratory infection. He might say that he is ‘basically healthy’ despite such afflictions. In becoming unhealthy, in addition to being sick we become sickly. Health is thus a state of resilience, a state of comparative invulnerability to disease.

We also talk of ‘health food’, and have a World Health Organisation which incorporates in its charter a definition of health as a ‘state of complete physical, mental and social well-being’.