e well as if they were ill. This
the writer admitted to be true, only adding that everyone is ill. To
which I rejoin that if everyone is ill the health adviser is ill too,
and therefore cannot know how to cure that minimum of illness. This is
the fundamental fallacy in the whole business of preventive medicine.
Prevention is not better than cure. Cutting off a man's head is not
better than curing his headache; it is not even better than failing to
cure it. And it is the same if a man is in revolt, even a morbid
revolt. Taking the heart out of him by slavery is not better than
leaving the heart in him, even if you leave it a broken heart.
Prevention is not only not better than cure; prevention is even worse
than disease. Prevention means being an invalid for life, with the
extra exasperation of being quite well. I will ask God, but certainly
not man, to prevent me in all my doings. But the decisive and
discussable form of this is well summed up in that phrase about the
health adviser of society. I am sure that those who speak thus have
something in their minds larger and more illuminating than the other
two propositions we have considered. They do not mean that all
citizens should decide, which would mean merely the present vague and
dubious balance. They do not mean that all medical men should decide,
which would mean a much more unbalanced balance. They mean that a few
men might be found who had a consistent scheme and vision of a healthy
nation, as Napoleon had a consistent scheme and vision of an army. It
is cold anarchy to say that all men are to meddle in all men's
marriages. It is cold anarchy to say that any doctor may seize and
segregate anyone he likes. But it is not anarchy to say that a few
great hygienists might enclose or limit the life of all citizens, as
nurses do with a family of children. It is not anarchy, it is tyranny;
but tyranny is a workable thing. When we ask by what process such men
could be certainly chosen, we are back again on the old dilemma of
despotism, which means a man, or democracy which means men, or
aristocracy which means favouritism. But as a vision the thing is
plausible and even rational. It is rational, and it is wrong.

It is wrong, quite apart from the suggestion that an expert on health
cannot be chosen. It is wrong because an expert on health cannot
exist. An expert on disease can exist, for the very reason we have
already considered in the case of madness, because experts ca