ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an overview of some of the key ways in which health has been perceived in western history. It argues that health often seems to have been most perceptible in its absence and at its restoration. The greater perceptibility of health at its restoration is a fairly straightforward idea. The onset of sickness, however, is also very often a perceptible loss of health: health can become more valuable and clearer in its qualities when it is leaving or when it is absent. Health’s perceptibility appears to rely on certain qualities, which when perceived, or longed for, indicate the presence, return or absence of health. These include strength, pleasure and ease. These qualities can vary in different places and periods across hundreds of years, but the range of qualities ultimately does not significantly change. As such, this chapter argues for a degree of consistency in the history of the perception of health. At the core of this chapter is an account of the sickness and recovery of the eighteenth-century English novelist Frances Burney at the court of George III. Other sources include the writings of Plato, Virginia Woolf, Samuel Johnson, Samuel Pepys, Galen of Pergamon, Samuel Johnson and Nelson Mandela.
