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# Disease and illness: Distinctions between professional and popular ideas of sickness

## Details

**Authors** Eisenberg, Leon

**Year** 1977

**Publisher** Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry

**Kind of work** article

**Discipline** Medicine

**Secondary disciplines** Psychology, Anthropology

**Applied** false

[Read it at the publisher](https://doi.org/10.1007/bf00114808) 
10.1007/bf00114808

## In authors' words

### What they set out to do (purpose)

To distinguish professional from popular conceptions of sickness and to ask how the gap between them affects medical care, using psychiatry as a test case.

### How they did it (methods)

Conceptual and historical argument drawing on medicine, psychiatry and cross-cultural accounts of healing.

### What they found (results)

Eisenberg separates illness, the patient's experience of disrupted well-being and social roles, from disease, a measurable abnormality in the structure or function of organs and systems as defined by scientific medicine. Patients suffer illness, while physicians diagnose and treat disease. He argues that a mechanical, Cartesian model of medicine widens the gap between what patients need and what physicians provide. He also argues that physicians who dismiss an illness because no disease is found fail their responsibility, and that social context shapes help-seeking, adherence to treatment and outcome. In psychiatry he describes competing organic, psychodynamic, behavioral and social models. He concludes that scientific and social concepts of disease and illness must be reintegrated as the basis for research and care.

## Commentary

### In short

The paper rests on a distinction (disease versus illness) whose two sides are defined by different vantage points, the physician's and the patient's. The disease concept locates sickness in the parts of the body and their functioning, while the illness concept locates it in the person's social relations. The recommended reintegration joins the two viewpoints without erasing the boundary between them.

**Patterns it shows** D, S, P

Shows the structure is there

**Added** 2026-10-11

**How to cite this** Eisenberg, Leon (1977). Disease and illness: Distinctions between professional and popular ideas of sickness. Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry.