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?356588596