Source: Bigstock

Sitting in a café in a station in France recently, I observed a young man sitting near me gazing into his telephone screen. No cobra hypnotized by a snake charmer could have been more mesmerized than he: He seemed to have been turned, or to have turned himself, into some kind of automaton.

Of course, the avoidance of conscious cerebration and the achievement of waking anesthesia is the desire of many people, for thought often brings pain with it (including the pain of boredom). “Doctor,” asked some of my patients in the prison, where distractions were few and intermittent, “can’t you stop me thinking?” It was not any particular obtrusive thought that they wanted abrogated, but thought in general.

Then a group of about ten women arrived. I recognized them at once as a bevy of alternative healers. They were middle-aged and wore loose cotton clothing of faded colors (faded not from use or repeated washing, but from choice) and open-air footwear. They had no makeup, carefully unkempt hair, and an air of moral complacency a little like that of some evangelicals who know that Jesus loves them more than he loves others. They were well-being—the concept of well-being, that is—made flesh.

“Well-being is to health what selfies are to photography.”

They spoke in English, but most of them were not native speakers, so I concluded that they had attended some kind of conference or other. As soon as they sat down, one of them began to perform cranial massage on another. I am sure the massage was pleasant and soothing for the person on whom it was performed, but there was something hieratic about the whole ceremony.

The very notion of well-being irritates me. It conjures up in my mind a diet of lentils, the odor of joss sticks, and the sound of wind chimes. Well-being is to health what selfies are to photography.

It is a curious fact that concern for health is not proportional to any risk to health. There was a time, not so very long ago, when newspapers and radio (the main media of mass communication at the time) spoke hardly a word about health matters, though the population was very much less healthy than it is now, and had far more to worry about.

When I was born, for example, the infant mortality rate—the number of infants per thousand live births who died in the first year of their lives—was twelve times what it is now. I look at photographs of people who were middle-aged in the year of my birth, and they have the appearance of people today two or three decades older than them.

My father experienced many years of suffering from peptic ulceration that was ended in the last decade of his life by a brief course of antibiotics. For years, he had eaten a diet of bland things cooked in milk: I can still smell them in my mind’s nostril. Another odor associated with the treatment was that of licorice, from pills containing glycyrrhizic acid. The peppermint added to the aluminum hydroxide suspension was another of the odors of peptic ulceration. He underwent two operations, one of which nearly killed him.

A considerable proportion of the elective surgery performed up to the 1980s was for peptic ulceration. There were various operations, from cutting the vagus nerve to the removal of parts of the stomach and the bypassing of the diseased duodenum, all with their risks and unpleasant side effects, and all of variable and rarely long-lasting benefit. There was much speculation about the causes of such ulceration, including unflattering reflections on the character of the people who suffered it.

I don’t think anyone today suffers from this disease as my father suffered—I can still hear him, in my mind’s ear, pacing the floor at night when gastric acid secretion was at its height. But his suffering was far from unique or uncommon. In the first half of the last century, millions of people suffered in this way.

What is true for peptic ulceration is true of many diseases. Surgery itself has been transformed out of all recognition. Operations that once entailed prolonged stays in hospital now, if not minor procedures exactly (a minor operation is one that is performed on somebody else, said Sir George Pickering, an eminent British physician), entail no more than a day or two in hospital, and sometimes not even that.

I do not, of course, deny that there is still much suffering caused by as-yet-untreatable disease, but our statistical chances of suffering such a disease, or of dying prematurely of one, are much reduced. But that suffering requires more than the pursuit of well-being for its alleviation.

Well-being is the concern of spoiled people with nothing wrong with them. Of course, they may be dissatisfied, because the causes of dissatisfaction with human existence are legion. Indeed, dissatisfaction is the permanent condition of mankind, and if we were ever to meet a perfectly satisfied person we should be appalled by him. Dickens satirized perfect self-satisfaction in the character of Mr. Podsnap.

The search for well-being is essentially egotistical, as well as futile. It is like the search for happiness when directly aimed at. If someone says that his ambition is to be happy, you know that he is a lost soul, just as someone who claims to lack self-esteem is a lost soul. Happiness and its pale, vapid quasi-physiological imitator, well-being, are not to be achieved, or arrived at by prescription, but are the consequence or by-product of an effortful life, appreciated only in retrospect.

Those who make a living from the promotion of well-being are therefore misleading people, though I hesitate to accuse them of fraud, which requires the conscious intention to deceive. They induce people to aim at what cannot be aimed at. But this activity, misleading to others, is beneficial to themselves. The poet Gerard Manley Hopkins started a poem:

Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?

(There is more than one Goldengrove estate in Wales, where Hopkins lived for a time.)

The poem ends with the line:

It is Margaret you mourn for.

This might be adapted to the case of the alternative healers:

It is healers you are healing.

Theodore Dalrymple’s latest book is On the Ivory Stages (Mirabeau Press).