The meaning of health

Alistair Tulloch, like many illustrious predecessors, has tried to do the impossible: to define a notional state of being called ‘health’.¹ Health is not a state, it is a continuum, analogous to height. In one direction is ‘worse’ or ‘shorter’; in the other ‘better’ or ‘taller’. The difference — and difficulty — is, of course, that height is uni-dimensional, whereas health is not. Perhaps ‘virtue’ is a better comparison. It is perfectly possible to take health's dimensions — physical, physiological, emotional, behavioural, social, and so on, each of which may, fractal-like, reduce even further — and say what point on each scale is more or less healthy than another. What is impossible is to reduce health's multidimensional spectral nature to one or more singularities and call this ‘health’.