Kay Toombs’ The Meaning of Illness: A Phenomenological Account of the Different Perspectives of Physician and Patient (1992) is not the first book in the series of Philosophy and Medicine to contain chapters referring to and making use of works in the phenomenological tradition. You find phenomenological perspectives in chapters published in earlier volumes of the series, mainly addressing questions related to the status and nature of the lived body, that is: the body as the point of view of everyday experience in contrast to the body as a biological organism. However, to my best knowledge, Toombs’ book it is the first monograph – not only in this series but in the English language – to deal explicitly with the phenomenology of illness, and, also, to relate this perspective of the patient to the medical encounter and the point of view of the physician. In her endeavor, Toombs makes use of arguments found in works by first-generation German and French phenomenologists, including works containing attempts to deal with the topic of phenomenology of health and illness, which is, as a matter of fact, a rather rare topic in the phenomenological tradition.