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Back in the 1920s, Charles Winslow, Founder of the School of Public Health at Yale, defined public health as ‘the science and art of preventing disease, prolonging life and promoting health through the organised efforts of society’. Winslow proposed this holistic and comprehensive definition at a time when science was beginning to offer the prospect of therapeutic interventions – such as antibiotics and insulin – that would change medicine’s traditional relationship with the humanities. Until then, the humanistic vision of health had been best evoked by William Morris. ‘At least I know this,’ he wrote in 1884, ‘that if a person is overworked in any degree they cannot enjoy the sort of health I am speaking of; nor if they are continually chained to one dull round of mechanical work with no hope at the end of it; nor if they live in continual sordid anxiety for their livelihood; nor if they are ill-housed; nor if they are deprived of all the enjoyment of the natural beauty of the world, nor if they have no amusement to quicken the flow of their spirits from time to time; all these things which touch more or less directly on their bodily condition are born of the claim I make to live in good health.’ The therapeutic age evolved different schools of public health and clinical practice, bringing into focus tensions in our thinking that reach back to ancient Greece. In Greek mythology, Aesculapius had two daughters, Hygieia and Panacea. For the former and her followers the secret to health lay in following the rules of clean living, while those who followed Panacea took the more cynical view that human beings are intrinsically weak and will abuse their bodies – so therapies will always be necessary.
‘ To make the best of our health
and wellbeing, we need to make it intrinsic to the way we think and live ’