[Health and sickness as sociological concepts]

Abstract

Health and illness, as widely used terms in scientific literature, leave a wide scope as to their definition and conceptual interpretation. The medicotechnical perspective refers to health and illness as objective changes in the structure and/or functioning of the human body and mind, as a result of which the bodily and mental integrity of the human organism is affected detrimentally. On the contrary, the social sciences, and especially medical sociology, define health and illness essentially in terms of the social system within which they occur. The main task of medical sociology is to pay attention to those social systemic and sociocultural aspects of health and illness which are sometimes grossly neglected or insufficiently understood by the medical sciences, thereby to contribute to a comprehensive approach to these phenomena.