Our next AGORA will be held at Klara i Rosa (Petefi Šandor 15) on Thursday, February 19, starting at 7 PM! The program will be led by Boris Čegar, philosophy professor.

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In contemporary philosophical discussions on disease, texts by Tod Lang (author of The End of Diseases), Ivan Ilič (Amicus Mortis), and Michel Foucault (History of Madness in the Classical Age) treat disease not only as a functional-biological problem but also as a historical, social, and epistemological construct.

Lang explores the idea of the “end of disease” in terms of how medicine classifies and understands pathological states. Advances in biotechnology, genetics, and diagnostic systems blur the boundary between healthy and sick. Instead of clearly defined diseases, we increasingly speak of risks, predispositions, and deviations from statistical norms. Disease thus becomes a process or spectrum, rather than necessarily an experience of suffering and pain.

Ilič, in Amicus Mortis, critiques modern medicine for its tendency to prolong life at all costs, depriving humans of a dignified relationship with death. He warns against the “medicalization of life,” where both death and aging are treated as technical problems to control. Within this framework, disease becomes a space of institutional power, and the patient loses individuality. Ilič emphasizes the need to return death and illness to the sphere of human experience and community, rather than leaving them solely to medical intervention.

Foucault, in History of Madness, shows that what we call disease—especially mental illness—is shaped by historically conditioned relations of knowledge and power. Madness is not simply a medical fact but the result of processes of exclusion, confinement, and normalization. Medicine and psychiatry do not merely uncover the “truth” about disease; they produce it through discourse and institutions. Disease, therefore, becomes part of a wider network of social control.

A common thread among these three authors is understanding disease as a point where body, power, technology, and culture intersect. In this sense, the “death of disease” does not mean the disappearance of suffering…