Abstract
The purpose of this paper is to give a new perspective to human illness. A good deal of discussion has been held on the difference between "illness" and "disease", especially from the viewpoints of medical anthropology and medicine for total health. However, no perspective yet adequately describes and appreciates "illness" as a complete experience forming part of human life. One problem with developing such a perspective is the concept of "illness" itself. It is well known that we sometimes achieve mental or spiritual growth through our experience of illness. But we usually say we "grow through our struggle with illness", instead of saying we "grow through our illness". When we use the first expression, illness is considered something to be overcome. But illness has another aspect, which Gabriel Marcel called "mystere", in contrast to "probleme". "Probleme" is that which we can analyze, answer to, and take measures to deal with from outside. In contrast, we can only "live" mystere by ourselves, and in mystere, questing itself is at the same time a kind of answer to it. So, as we can learn from Buddhism, we must view illness as an essential human life-experience having a secret treasure. A second problem concerns the limitation of the frameworks of medical professions that use the term "illness". From the perspective set out above, these frameworks are too narrow to fully describe and appreciate our experiences of illness. In other words, these frameworks tend to reduce the "mystere" of illness to the "probleme" of it. We must therefore focus carefully on the narratives of patients who live their own mystere of illness and endeavor to understand them from the viewpoint of "wisdom of illness", which means going beyond the framework offered by medical professionalism.
