ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with definitional issues bedevil much discussion of health and illness. The importance of the distinction between disease and illness is that the relationship between disease and illness is not isomorphic but highly complex and depends on a number of social and psychological factors. The World Health Organization definition of health, as 'a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being, not merely the absence of disease or infirmity', is the best known attempt to propose an idealized definition of health. Despite all the conceptual problems, the apparently multidimensional ideas that people have about what constitutes 'health', 'illness', 'disease', and 'fitness', it is obviously useful at times for social investigators to try to develop and use measurements or indicators of health. Health indicators may also be required as independent, intervening or dependent variables in social investigation. Like age, gender and race, health and illness are social categories with physical foundations.
