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This chapter begins by illustrating how love can simultaneously involve sickness and immorality, using examples of jealousy, unrequited love, and sadomasochism. It then outlines a virtue-oriented conception of healthy love, illustrating how moral and therapeutic conceptions of love overlap. The chapter concludes by replying to Robert Bellah's criticisms of the therapeutic trend regarding love.

This chapter discusses responsibility for health in the context of client-therapist relationships. It begins by considering Samuel Butler's Erewhon, a novel that adumbrates the current uncertainty about responsibilities for health and provokes us to clarify the meaning and foundation of those responsibilities. It then critiques two ideologies about therapy that distort our understanding of responsibilities for health. One ideology concerns the sick role: to be sick is to be an innocent victim, and nonjudgmental therapy implies not holding patients responsible for their sickness. The other concerns science and causation: sick people (as well as healthy ones) are completely determined by biological and environmental forces in ways that remove moral responsibility. It is argued that these ideologies are as inimical to effective therapy as to sound morality.

This chapter addresses the question of whether victims of mental disorders or physical diseases should be blamed for their problems. It explores how an integrated, moral-therapeutic perspective encourages acceptance of responsibility for health without unfair and destructive forms of blame. The discussion is structured around four health-related contexts: (1) preventing sickness, (2) assigning financial liabilities for health care costs, (3) giving meaning to suffering, and (4) interacting with health care professionals. What we say about blame in one of these contexts is relevant to but does not dictate what we say in other contexts.

This chapter presents an integrated, moral-therapeutic perspective on alcoholism. Beginning in the mid-1930s, Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) invigorated the therapeutic trend by convincing health professionals and the American public that alcoholism is a disease rather than a morally bad habit. In contrast, it is argued that alcoholism is both a sickness and a morally bad habit. It is a disorder of agency that has physical, psychological, and moral dimensions. The chapter concludes that beneath the disagreements about alcoholism, there is agreement on many key points: alcoholism raises major medical and moral issues; alcoholism is not dictated by a simple biochemical abnormality; most alcoholics retain significant episodic control; most have difficulty (in varying degrees) in controlling their overall patterns of drinking and need help; drinkers have responsibility to avoid causing harm, to cooperate in solving their drinking problems, and to make amends for the harm they cause; and self-righteous blaming and destructive self-blaming are objectionable on both moral and therapeutic grounds. These conclusions provide a partial roadmap for thinking about additional forms of wrongdoing as sickness.

This chapter presents an integrated, moral-therapeutic perspective on pathological gambling. Such a perspective emphasizes helping individuals to accept responsibility, where responsibility refers to obligations rather than to blame. It understands therapy as a special moral context rather than as replacing morality. The perspective highlights how habits shape identity and conduct, how loss of self-control is both an impairment and morally objectionable, and how moral values partly define problem gambling. It makes sense of how addictions, whether or not they involve ingested substances, can be both wrongdoing and sickness.

This chapter presents an integrated, moral-therapeutic perspective on crime and punishment. It begins by noting how the morality-therapy dichotomy constricted classical debates about punishment. Using as examples kleptomania (compare compulsive gambling) and drug abuse (compare alcoholism), it is shown how serious crime can be both a wrongdoing and a sickness. These examples are familiar in debates about therapeutic approaches to crime, and they provide continuity with the preceding discussions of addictions. The chapter then discusses the possibility of extending a moral-therapeutic approach to other serious crime, and concludes with comments on legal insanity.

The origin of medicine is apparent from other ancient texts such as from a document with the ambitious title “The Nature of Man”. One of the texts was dedicated to “falling sickness,” or epilepsy under the title “The Sacred Disease,” including the hitherto valid idea that, judging by the sometimes exceedingly strange course of this illness, it must be something divine, coming from the gods. Falling sickness is an illness whose causes, like those of all other illnesses, lie somewhere in nature. The renunciation of the idea that illness is caused by the numinous powers and of the need to treat illness with magic and invocation makes sense. The author of “The Divine Illness” thought no more or less rationally than those who saw falling sickness as something divine. The observation of the sick individual had not produced any evidence for the new view at any rate. For him, only the belief was lost that the gods, whose existence was responsible for the development of falling sickness. He lost this belief not because he had observed an epileptic, or several epileptics, or even a very large number of them. Something else must have caused the change in his view.

The idea that a body as an organism has self-interest and tries to heal its own wounds and overcome difficult crises on its own is based on the model image of the self-regulating, autonomous polis. The polis had transformed itself from the monarchy and the rule of the noble families into a democratic structure that was optimal for the situation of the time, a democracy in which the citizens were the sovereigns of their own fates through their meetings. The polis was a social organism and it was entirely unavoidable that its structures lent the plausibility needed for the explanatory model of the self-healing powers to find general acceptance. The fact that sickness heals on its own is also described repeatedly in the ancient Chinese literature. The ancient Chinese literature does not contain descriptions of the course of a normally fatal illness taking an unanticipated and unexpected turn for the better. China has never known trust in the self-regulating powers of the pan-societal organism.

This chapter focuses on Europe at the time when Vesalius demonstrated the reality of human anatomy with the help of his illustrator, Titian's student Jan Steven van Kalkar, a contemporary of the sixteenth century. Half a century before van Kalkar's drawings, Leonardo da Vinci, who was a painter, architect, technician, and observer of nature, offered previously unknown views into the reality of the interior of the body. Vesalius' contemporary, Gabriele Fallopio became famous for his discovery of the fallopian tubes. Other contemporaries, Giovanni Battista Canano and Girolamo Fabrizio ab Aquadependente, became famous for discovering and describing the vein valves. Morgagni became famous for showing more clearly than others that the organs were the sites of disease. The anatomists and pathologists made significant efforts to explore the body's interior and brought much reality to light. Medicine covered several terms such as is normal and sick and it also explains the change from normal to sick and return from sick to normality.

This chapter examines the views of experts from the nineteenth century on the reasons that lead to the sickness of an individual. Some believed that pathogens were responsible for sickness. Others said that pathogens could invade the body only if a door had been opened beforehand. Robert Koch believed the defense strategy involved washing hands and keeping germs away. The chapter also focuses on the new cleanliness of society. Every individual was responsible for his own morality. The sick person was doubly victimized by the system. First, the environment made someone ill and second, the body's defense system has failed. The environment might have caused so much stress that made a person sick. Sometimes an individual's carelessness openly invites the pathogen. But there are not always a great number of pathogens or self-culpability. The new plausibility diverted responsibility from the lone individual to the system.

Who took care of the Roman child when it was sick? The nanny, a doctor, the mother, both parents, the father alone? The chapter builds on the reflections of Galen, the second founder of Western medicine after Hippocrates, born in Asia Minor but a practitioner in Rome, where most of his case-histories take place. The study of his vocabulary relating to youth (baby, child, young man) reveals that not a single girl is described, and that it is impossible to compare attitudes towards boys and girls as one can do for Cicero's Marcus and Tullia: is it just a difference in emotional concern? Are ambitions for the sake of the family line and private memories involved? The testimony of a doctor who, by the very nature of his daily work, knew the secrets of the houses he entered, is very useful, especially at the end of a very long practice.

One of the aspects of women's lovesickness which has caused the most confusion is its relation to three other female maladies: hysteria, green sickness, and uterine fury. Although many critics assume that lovesickness is a version of one or several of these illnesses, lovesickness, hysteria, green sickness, and uterine fury are understood as separate maladies in the early modern period, with their own unique set of symptoms, stereotypical sufferers, and cultural associations. There is, however, an exception. When a woman's lovesickness develops into full-scale madness (as in the case of Ophelia), her illness is frequently seen to be related to her virginity and menstrual cycle and is thus represented as being similar to uterine disorders. This chapter outlines the medical constructions and literary representations of green sickness, hysteria, and uterine fury, and examines Shakespeare's Hamlet and Shakespeare and Fletcher's The Two Noble Kinsmen, two texts that associate lovesickness with uterine disorders.

This chapter re-evaluates Fronto's letters within the traditions of epistolary scholarship and against the backdrop of a surge of interest in the epistolarity of the letter collections of antiquity. Because Fronto has a valuable role to play in the call for a reassessment of the Roman letter-writing voice and identity, his correspondence with his pupil, emperor-in-the-making Marcus Aurelius, is examined. The recurring narrative of sickness and health that features in over eighty of the extant letters between Fronto and Marcus Aurelius is examined, with a particular emphasis on the ailments of the former. This chapter explores the pressing question of whether Fronto and Marcus Aurelius' letters should be regarded as simply reflecting the trend of their age to open up about one's state of health, or whether there is something more pointed, more calculated about such an epistolary narrative.

The Introduction summarises the book’s main arguments, provides definitions of key terms, sets out the parameters of the study, and situates the research in its wider historiographical context. It also provides a substantial discussion of the book’s methodology, identifying the types of primary material used in the analysis, and the various limitations and challenges presented by these sources. These include the problems of deducing the child’s experience from the words of adults, the religious and socio-economic biases of the sources, and the complicating issues of censorship, literary convention, and reader reception.

In Gallipoli medical evacuation was hampered by unrealistic casualty estimates, poor planning of sea-borne evacuation, and a general failure of communication between commanders and medical staff. High levels of disease and poor sanitary discipline also meant that sickness rates were far higher than they had been on the Western Front. These medical failures contributed to loss confidence in the management of the campaign and were examined by the Dardanelles Commission appointed in 1916. This chapter explains why medical arrangements were so much worse than on the Western Front, paying particular attention to the exclusion of medical officers from headquarters in the vital planning stages of the operation. It ends by considering the verdict of the Dardanelles Commission and the expectations of witnesses summoned before it.

The proper Christian response to sickness and suffering is care. Care refers to politics of the Christian community with respect to sickness and suffering, in that it encompasses the entire range of obligations the community has toward the sick person and vice‐versa. God has called women and men into a community of friends who are to offer hospitality to one another and to the world as a sign of God's care for the world. Such care requires the cultivation of virtue, especially the virtue of misericordia.