ABSTRACT
The term ‘health’ (stemming from the Old English word hael, or ‘whole’) means different things to different people (Kiple 1993: pp. 45– 110). In modern Western medicine, for example, a ‘healthy’ person or place is often judged according to the absence (or otherwise) of a medically defined disease or disorder. The charter of the World Health Organization (WHO) favours a broader definition of health as a ‘state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity’ (WHO: 1988: p. 1). At a more abstract level, health can be defined according to the unidirectional nature of time; as Hudson (1993) notes, unless other factors intervene, our genetic programmes are inexorably geared towards disease and death. Other medical systems have placed yet further interpretations on health. In ancient Greek medicine, for example, health was viewed in terms of a balance in the bodily humours (blood, phlegm, and yellow and black bile), while notions of balance and harmony also underpinned conceptions of health in ancient Chinese and other Asian medical systems (Shigehisa 1993).
