The Concept of Health – Evolution from Historical to Modern Times

The concept of health and wellbeing has significantly evolved with different definitions coming from varied sources over the matter of time. All the concepts revolving around health can be divided into two major categories, viz. historical and modern. A brief overview of these ideologies is given below along with some definitions from organizations like the World Health Organization.

The Historical Concepts

In ancient Greece, the backbone of the perception of health was linked to a balance between a person & the environment, the unity of soul & the body, as well as the natural origin of disease. Through time, various other considerations & definitions of health came to light, a few of which are listed below:

• Pindar, in the 5th century BC, defined health as “harmonious functioning of the organs”, laying an emphasis on the physical dimension of health, the physical body, and the overall functionality, accompanied by the feeling of comfort and absence of pain.
• Plato (429-347 BC) pointed out that a perfect human society could be achieved by harmonizing the interests of the individual with that of community. In addition, the ideal of ancient Greek philosophy “a healthy mind in a healthy body” could be achieved if people established internal harmony and harmony with the physical and the social environment.
• Democritus connected health with behavior, wandering why people prayed to God for health, which was essentially under their own control.
• Hippocrates, the creator of the “positive health” concept, described health in connection with the environmental factors and lifestyle. According to him, proper diet and exercise were essential for health.

Concepts in the Middle Ages

In the Middle Ages, health perception was strongly influenced by religion and the church.

• During the period of the Industrial Revolution, health became an economic category, which was to allow good condition and working ability and reduce lost work days due to illness. The health was intertwined with Darwinian understandings of strength and being the fittest, where the meaning of life was tied to physical survival.
• Another health aspect considered the ability of the individual to adapt to the influences of the environment to the extent of toleration & resistance of an individual. When the adjustment level is over, the disease occurs as a natural consequence. This approach first reflected only biological mechanisms of adaptation, while influences from the environment were added later.

The Modern Concepts

All modern concepts of health recognize health as more than the absence of disease, implying a maximum capacity of the individual for self-realization and self-fulfillment.

• The holistic concept of health is contained in the expression of wholeness. Health is a relative state in which one is able to function well physically, mentally, socially, and spiritually to express the full range of one’s unique potentialities within the environment in which one lives.
• Both health and illness are dynamic processes and each person is located on a graduated scale or continuous spectrum (continuum) ranging from wellness and optimal functioning in every aspect of one’s life, at one end, to illness culminating in death, at the other.
• The theory of salutogenesis takes a different view of what creates health and what factors support health, as opposed to the conventional approach of pathogenesis to study the factors that cause disease.

Health, as defined by the World Health Organization
The definition of health, as per WHO, was proposed by Dr. Andrija Štampar, a prominent social medicine and public health scholar from Croatia and one of the WHO founders. This modern understanding of health that became official when the World Health Organization was established in 1948 states that “health is a state of complete physical, mental, & social well-being and not merely the absence of a disease or an infirmity”