The Anthropological poin of view  (introduction)

Within critical anthropological reflections on medicine, one of the most influential distinctions is that proposed by Arthur Kleinman (1980; 1988), later developed by scholars such as Byron Good (1994) and Margaret Lock & Vinh-Kim Nguyen (2010), between disease, illness, and sickness.
These three categories do not simply describe different aspects of illness, but rather reveal distinct epistemic regimes which, in contemporary societies, tend to become increasingly separated, generating profound fractures in both the experience of living and the practice of healing.

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Disease refers to illness as defined by biomedicine: an objective alteration of biological functioning, identifiable through clinical signs, laboratory tests, and diagnostic protocols. It is illness that is measurable, classifiable, and treatable. In this sense, disease is the product of a form of knowledge that, as Foucault (1963) has shown, is grounded in a regime of visibility that renders the body legible as an anatomical object, while silencing the lived dimension.

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Illness, by contrast, refers to the subjective experience of being unwell: what the person feels, narrates, and interprets. It encompasses pain, fear, and disorientation, as well as the attempt to assign meaning to what is happening. As Kleinman emphasizes, “illness is what the patient brings with them into the doctor’s office” (The Illness Narratives, 1988).
Byron Good (1994) has shown how this dimension is narratively structured: illness becomes an embodied story, a process through which the subject seeks to recompose the rupture between self and world.

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Finally, sickness refers to the social dimension of illness: the way a society recognizes, legitimizes, and manages a pathological condition. It includes norms, roles, expectations, as well as inequalities and power dynamics that determine who is considered ill, who has access to care, and under what conditions. In this sense, sickness is deeply intertwined with the processes of medicalization and biopolitics described by Foucault (1976), as well as with the institutional and global logics analyzed by Lock and Nguyen (2010).