Abstract

There are many references to the cruelty of disease in the philosophical traditions of the West. This article seeks to explore in what ways disease could be meaningfully said to be cruel. By looking at recent definitions of disease, and refining the World Health Organisation's definition of health, the article briefly discusses the cruelty of disease from the professional perspective, the cruelty of illness from the personal perspective, and the cruelty of sickness from the social perspective. This multidimensional concept of disease stresses the complexity of ways in which we attribute cruelty to events, processes or states of things.