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Sickness and health appear to be opposites. They are not, any more than heat or cold are, for instance. Just as the latter are effects of different wave lengths, so illness and health are effects of one and the same life. Illness does not come from the outside; it is not an enemy, but a creation of the organism, of the It. The It — or we may call it the vital force, the self, the organism — this It, about which we know nothing and of which we shall never recognise more than some of its outward forms, tries to express something by illness; to be ill has to mean something.
It is impossible to find a general and universal meaning, impossible because there is no definite boundary between sick and healthy, because we cannot say illness starts here, health ends there, not even theoretically, as we can with the zero point in measuring temperature. Finally, as with everything else, we can only determine the meaning which illness has for human beings, or the even more restricted meaning which we individually give it; an ant or an oak tree gives a different meaning to this expression of life than human beings, and Miller's meaning is different from Jones'.
And yet the question about the meaning of illness is of value, of practical value, of value for the physician, and everybody is a physician who treats illness, be he a consultant or a country doctor, a shepherd, faith-healer, wise old woman, or simply a mother, for the medical licence has to do with the titular aspect of the doctor and not with the concept. It would be good if general attention were drawn to this question of the meaning of illness, and if an attempt could be made to find at least a provisional answer to it. It is rewarding to take one of the innumerable forms of illness and look at it as impartially as possible