[Natural and unnatural health]

There are four historical eras of health and illness. During the first era, which lasted many hundred centuries, health was interpreted as a state of absent or transient illness, the latter being a manifestation of death, the bitter beginning of a bad end. Only healthy persons with a finite disease should be treated, and only until they have recovered and can continue to live as before. The second era also accepts that death stands behind illness and that the physician must surrender to it whenever he meets definite illness. But in the light of the biblical message of firstly Judaism and then Christianity, love already shows the path leading further to the affirmative devotion to the sufferer: "patient". If the return to everyday-life was impossible, there was love and as a new "invention" the visit at the bedside as a work of charity. Only modern science and its industrialization ushered in a new era. The patient who is no more in for death expects in this third era very much more than the blessing of a visit. He even feels somewhat uncomfortable about being called on as a sick person, which he is only for a time now. But this era of rescuing treatment of all diseases without exception, because all diseases are essentially curable has also misleading consequences since research and business done with medicine everywhere in the world tends to suggest that pain, disease-and death as well!-can be eliminated. This promise of Unnatural Health makes the sick and dying persons meaningless to themselves.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)