1: Infections are transmitted by different types of “germs,” including bacteria and viruses. Some germs can cause asymptomatic infection, which means that the person can have the ‘germ’ in their body, but they don’t have any symptoms of the disease or they have very mild symptoms and don’t really feel sick, according to the Division of Infectious Diseases at UAMS. And if the particular “germ” can be transmitted by coughing or sneezing, for example, then the person may transmit the infection to someone else without knowing it and without having any symptoms themselves. Other types of infections make everyone who gets exposed become symptomatic, in other words. to feel sick. Some of these can also be transmitted from person to person. As for viruses that cause colds, people can, in fact, transmit these viruses with mild or minimal symptoms themselves. In this case, they’re considered asymptomatic carriers. They usually don’t have the virus in their system for a prolonged period of time, though.
2: Dis-ease (from old French and ultimately Latin) is literally the absence of ease or elbow room. The basic idea is of an impediment to free movement. But nowadays the word is more commonly used without a hyphen to refer to a “disorder of structure or function in an animal or plant of such a degree as to produce or threaten to produce detectable illness or disorder”—or again, more narrowly, to “a definable variety of such a disorder, usually with specific signs or symptoms or affecting a specific location”. That at least is how the New Shorter Oxford Dictionary1 defines it, adding as synonyms: “(an) illness”, “(a) sickness”. Let me stay with the dictionary to see what it says about those synonyms. Illness has three definitions. Two of them are of the way the word was used up to the 18th century—to mean either “wickedness, depravity, immorality”, or “unpleasantness, disagreeableness, hurtfulness”. These older meanings reflect the fact that the word “ill” is a contracted form of “evil”. The third meaning, dating from the 17th century, is the modern one: “Ill health; the state of being ill”. The dictionary defines “ill” in this third sense as “a disease, a sickness”. Looking up “sickness” we find “The condition of being sick or ill; illness, ill health”; and under “sick” (a Germanic word whose ultimate origin is unknown, but may be onomatopoeic) we find “affected by illness, unwell, ailing … not in a healthy state”, and, of course, “having an inclination to vomit”. There is a rather unhelpful circularity. But dictionaries of the English language usually only aim to tell us the origins of words and how they have been used historically. They do not aim at the much more contestable goal of conceptual clarity. For that we have to look elsewhere. In this case, let us look at how disease, illness and sickness have been elucidated first by a medical practitioner, who ought to know something about the subject; and then, after noting some popular and literary definitions, by a philosopher, who ought to know something about conceptual clarity.Some diseases, clearly, are less respectable than others. A classic example is Munchausen's syndrome, the diagnostic label applied to people who repeatedly present themselves to hospitals with convincing symptoms, often demanding and sometimes undergoing surgery which reveals no organic disorder. People with Munchausen's syndrome may seem reminiscent of Marinker's repeat prescription patients who seek “a healing relationship with another who articulates society's willingness and capability to help”. But their condition is more likely to be dismissed as “a bizarre form of malingering”6 or “the systematic practice of deliberate and calculated simulation of disease so as to obtain attention, status and free accommodation and board”.7 Most of them, it may be explained, “are suffering from psychopathic personality or personality defect”, a condition defined as being “characterised by impulsive, egocentric and antisocial behaviour”, with “a difficulty in forming normal relationships, and a manner which is either aggressive or charming or which alternates between the two”.8 That, it might be observed, makes them sound suspiciously like people who have not had the opportunity or luck to end up as successful politicians or captains of industry. People labelled with Munchausen's syndrome then, may have succeeded in getting recognised as being sick, but not in the sense they intended. In Marinker's terms, their sickness has pretty low status. It is doubtfully a disease, and as illness its meaning veers more towards the pre- than post-18th century usage—“wickedness, depravity, immorality”. Such words, or the colloquial “sick, sick, sick”, are even more likely, of course, to be applied to the perpetrators of Munchausen syndrome by proxy—people who abuse a child or frail elderly relative by making them ill or pretending that they are ill.
