I’ve long been bemused by the lack of reference to health in healthcare training. The standard clinical textbooks of Medicine not only have no chapters on health, books like Davidson, still a standard medical school text don’t even have an index entry for health.
Then the other day I stumbled on an old document from 1938 entitled “The Wheel of Health”, by G T Wrench MD. The content of the text is not what I want to mention today, but I’d like to share the following paragraphs from the author’s introduction.
Why was it that as students we were always presented with sick or convalescent people for our teaching and never with the ultrahealthy? Why were we only taught disease? Why was it presumed that we knew all about health in its fulness? 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. We started from our knowledge of the dead, from which we interpreted the manifestations, slight or severe, of threatened death, which is disease. Through these various manifestations, which fattened our text-books, we approached health. By the time, however, we reached real health, like that of the keen times of public school, the studies were dropped. Their human representatives, the patients, were now well, and neither we nor our educators were any longer concerned with them. We made no studies of the healthy–only the sick.
1938! He could have written that today!
Does this not surprise you?
Heroes Not Zombies 
Wow. This is a passage to keep.
I must look out an old historical paper on ‘Pathology’ . . . I think also from the early 20th century . . . in the Journal of mental Sciences if I recall. The author also commented that we have pathological lenses.