Sir: David Martin Jones (September 2020) writes splendidly of “the medicalisation of life”, with particular attention to plagues and pandemics from the late middle ages to the present. He correctly states that after 1945 WHO programs “reinforced the authority of science and the medicalisation of life”. However, the roots of the medicalisation of life are not simply the plagues and pandemics. In 1946 the WHO moved the goalposts, defining “health” as “a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity”. So, health is defined in terms of “well-being”, which is taken…