The Ubiquity of Chronic Illness.

This is a review of five different books dealing with some aspect of what might be termed a "chronic illness" - Alzheimer's disease, lupus, addiction, erectile dysfunction, and leprosy. The array of different subjects examined in these books points to the negotiable limits of this hugely open category. What exactly constitutes an "illness"? Why not use a less biomedical term instead: "disturbance", "problem", or simply "condition"? And how are we to understand "chronic" - simply as the flipside of "acute" or "curable"?