ABSTRACT
There are numerous concepts that orbit disease, among them illness, sickness, legitimacy, validity, malingering and biomedicine. This chapter takes each in turn and asks: how resilient are these ideas upon deeper reflection? How necessary are they to understanding how disease operates in society? Old dichotomies, such as the disease/illness/sickness divide, are challenged, but the true purpose of such an investigation is to slowly put together a language with which to analyse patient’s experiences of those conditions that seem most troubling conceptually – contested illnesses.
