11
Whole Diets
E. Balfour
In the Introduction to his book, The Wheel of Health,^1 Dr Wrench makes this
thought-provoking statement: ‘After debating the question – Why disease? Why
not health? – again and again with my fellow students, I slowly, before I qualified,
came to a further question – Why was it that as students we were always presented
with sick or convalescent people for our teaching and never with the ultra healthy?
Why were we only taught disease: why was it presumed that we knew all about
health in its fullness? The teaching was wholly one-sided. Moreover, the basis of
our teaching upon disease was pathology, namely, the appearance of that which is
dead from disease.’
This view, that the professional attitude to sickness is one-sided is shared by
the compilers of the PEP Report (1936) on the British Health Services. The authors
express it as follows:
Health means more than not being ill. A new attitude is needed, involving not so much
a departure from the old as a more thorough grasp of the different elements in health
policy. Many people are at any given moment suffering from defects, injuries or sickness
so pronounced as to make them unable to carry on ordinary occupations and leisure
activities. These are the ‘cases’ with which a large part of the organized health services
mainly deal. But in addition there are far larger numbers of people suffering temporarily
or permanently from less acute defects, injuries, or inadequacies, which are not sufficient
to unfit them for work or play, and may not even be noticed at all, but nevertheless suffice
to place them in an unnecessarily weak position for creating and maintaining good phy-
sique, energy, happiness, or resistance to disease... No contemporary health policy can be
considered adequate which does not deal with the second group as well as the first...
While efforts at effecting the cure of diseases cannot be relaxed, efforts at preven-
tion of ill health can and must be increased. The aspect of raising standards of nutrition
and of fitness should be given much prominence. Health must come first: the mere state
of not being ill must be recognized as an unacceptable substitute, too often tolerated or
even regarded as normal. We must, moreover, face the fact that while immense study has
been lavished on disease no one has intensively studied and analysed health,^2 and ourReprinted from Balfour E. 1943. Whole diets, in Balfour E. The Living Soil, Faber and Faber, London.
Chapter 7, pp161–179.