Human Experience of Illness

Ivan Illych is described to be the person who chose to live a luxurious kind of life. The life story of Ivan Ilych is defined to be a life full of devoid passion. Herein, the paper will discuss the ‘healing environment’ and phenomenology of the illness and the disease that Ivan Ilych battled until the time of his death. However, later on in his life course, Ilych came to learn that the wealth he possessed only led to envy among his friends. This brought the lack of generosity in his life, thus resulting in him living in a society full of lies. Due to this, Ilych now came to realize that his relationships are more worth than the fancy things he had already acquired. He needed to work on being himself and restore his relationship status and forget about the envious society and friends that he had. 

Based on the ‘healing environment,’ Ivan Ilych began to suffer from an incurable disease at the point when he was about to achieve what he had always yearned for in life. His downfall started a particular day when he was hanging curtains in his home (Neimneh, Obeidat, & Bani-Hani, 2016). From that day, despite the several doctors that came at Ivan Ilych’s house, his condition continued worsening. According to Tolstoy (2014), the doctors who came to treat him might have been jealous of his wealth too or might have been influenced by the surrounding environment of Ivan Ilych, who were envious of him. As a result, this created an environment that no one was there caring about him. Instead, everyone wanted to see him meet his death so that they may inherit all the wealth that he possessed. Hence, his symptoms continued to develop to an extent where he developed pain on the left side of his body. On the other hand, his mouth developed a foul taste. His physical status worsened more and more each day, prolonging his suffering to both the family, friends, and doctors who took care of him. 

However, his illness has never been identified, and as a result, the story of his death remains fiction. This depicts the reason why studies have urged that the story of his illness should be understood metaphorically instead of being understood literally. This occurred in steps from the first month when he developed the illness until the very third month when it became clear to him and the whole of his family, doctors, and friends that he can no longer survive anymore. The only thing that now awaited him was death, which he finally succumbed to it. 

Based on personal experiencing, dealing with illness remains to be a challenging issue in medical theory anthropology. For instance, in the recent past, I was infected by a common cold. It resulted in a change in my social life status whereby I was forced to stay at home, away from school, since the infection is contagious, and thus, it could result in other people being infected. In this, I isolated myself for one week. The only people I encountered were family members who offered medication. I felt like I was being grounded by the disease where I could not make up to meet my friends for one week. Generally, it can be termed as influencing my social life. 

Conclusively, the same can be seen happening in Ivan Ilych’s life. The moment he succumbed to sickness, his social life went down. This meant that all the wealth he had created was nothing compared to his current health. He needed to work on getting well. All his wealth had to be channeled int the medical sector to facilitate his treatment. Also, all family attention was redirected to him. However, from his death, we see that living well is a form of dying well. This is the kind of life that Ivan Ilych lived. 

References 

Neimneh, S., Obeidat, M., & Bani-Hani, K. (2016). Reading Illness in Leo Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilych: Perspectives on Literature and Medicine.  English Language and Literature Studies , 59-69. 

Tolstoy, L. (2014).  The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Confession . WW Norton & Company. 

Shelly, J. A., & Miller, A. B. (2009).  Called to care: A Christian worldview for nursing . InterVarsity Press.