Where does morbidity collide?

In epidemiology and public health, morbidity is the state or rate of being diseased, injured, or in ill health within a population, measured apart from death itself. It is captured by figures such as incidence and prevalence, and combined with early death in composite measures like the disability-adjusted life year, which Murray and Lopez's 1997 Global Burden of Disease Study used to weigh sickness alongside mortality across the world. The referent here is the load of illness carried by living people, counted as cases and lost healthy years, not a personal appetite for the gruesome or a quality of a work of art.[1]

Unit

A count or rate of illness in a population, such as cases per 1,000 people

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Quantified as incidence and prevalence, and summarised in composite burden measures such as disability-adjusted life years

In psychology, morbid curiosity is an individual-difference trait: a person's characteristic drive to seek out information about dangerous, threatening, or unpleasant things such as death, violence, and bodily harm. Scrivner's 2021 The psychology of morbid curiosity developed and validated the Morbid Curiosity Scale, treating this appetite for the disturbing as a stable dimension on which people differ and score. The referent is a measurable feature of a mind, an attraction toward the frightening, not a rate of illness in a population or a theme running through a body of art.[2]

Unit

One person's standing on a scale of attraction to threatening information

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Assessed by self-report on the Morbid Curiosity Scale and related questionnaire items

In literary and aesthetic criticism, the morbid names a preoccupation with death, decay, disease, and the gruesome treated as a source of beauty or fascination, a quality prized in Gothic fiction and the later Decadent movement. Praz's 1933 The Romantic Agony traced this taste across Romantic and Decadent writing, showing how sickness, cruelty, and the corpse became recurring objects of aesthetic delight. The referent is a category of style and theme in art and literature, identified by critics in the works themselves, not a population's disease load or a trait scored in an individual.[3]

Unit

A recurring theme or quality of a work: its dwelling on death and decay

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Identified by critics through recurring motifs of death, disease, and decay, and their treatment as objects of beauty