In medicine the understanding and interpretation of the complex reality of illness currently refers either to an organismic approach that focuses on the physical or to a 'holistic' approach that takes into account the patient's human sociocultural involvement.

Section I Interpreting illness and medecine in the context of humanlife: experience vs. objectivity.- Illness as Lived Experience and as the Object of Medicine.- The Construction of Illness: A Context Problem.- Defining Disease: Much Ado about Nothing?.- Critique of Freud’s Notion of Mental Illness.- Cancer from the Medical and Existential Points of View.- The Experience of Illness and the Meaning of Death.- Section II Newchallenges to the understanding of medicine: The ethical parameters. Toward new “Medical humanism”.- Application or Interpretation?The Role of Clinical Bioethics between Moral Principles and Concrete Situations.- Medicine as a Practice and the Ethics of Illness.- Sense or Nonsense of Illness in Ethics of the Body.- The Loss of the Sense of Illness: Euthanasia and the Right to Die.- Is it Possible to Give Sense to Illness?.- Towards a New Approach to Medical Humanism.- Section III The life-tanscending parameters in the interpretation of suffering,death and human existence: buddhism,judaism,christianity.- The Meaning of Suffering in Buddhism andChristianity.- The Christian Interpretation of Suffering.- La Maladie dans la Tradition Juive: Orthodoxie et Orthopraxie.- La Souffrance de Job.- Le Sens de la Maladie: Une Perspective Spirituelle Chrétienne.- La Signification des Miracles de Jésus.- Index of namesS.