Is it permissible to speak of politics in matters of health, or of health in matters of politics? Has health in Lebanon any politics — or has politics in Lebanon any health, one wonders?

Between politics and health in our country there is a marked aversion, plain to see on both sides. The political circle, on the one hand, considers the rank of health work to be among the lowest ranks on the ladder of ranks; and the health circle, on the other hand, considers the rank of political work to be alien to it, and beneath its worth — in essence, and in its claim upon a man's attention. Hence the politicians, when they distribute the various posts responsible for rendering the various services to the various parts of the people, do not race for the posts responsible for health as they race for certain others;

nor do they carve out for health its due share of the general budget, but assign to it whatever the leavings of the budget allow, after the shares of most of the other important public services have been cut from it. And likewise the men of health: if it fell to them, say, to shoulder the responsibility of politics in general, they would distribute the various posts and divide the chapters of the budget according to their own conception (not the politicians' conception) of the relative importance of the various public services, and would give the educational, health, and agricultural services the importance that befits them.

Yes, one observes clearly that there is a plain difference between politics' view of health and health's view of politics. Politics, in its essence, is a reconciling and balancing of duties with rights, and of responsibilities with powers, in the arena of the continuous interplay between the individual and the community. Health, in its essence, is the application of politics to one single service among the services of the public interest — namely, the service of the body and all that it involves: the relief of pain, the treatment of sickness, the warding off of ailments, and the improvement of man's capacity to

enjoy material and moral well-being together. Hence politics is a psychological and social movement in the full sense of the word, while health is at once a biological and a psychological-social movement.

Politics, then, concerns itself with what is more important than the body, inasmuch as it concerns itself with the purpose for which man was placed upon this earth within the frame of the body; and therefore it is more important than health, because it contains it — while health is the less important, not only because it is a part of politics, but because it concerns itself with the body and what pertains to it; and the body is nothing but an instrument for those values for whose sake arose the need to order men's affairs with one another — that is, for politics itself. In other words, the concerns of politics include

the concerns of health as an instrument, and not the reverse. We gather from this definition of each — of politics and of health — that the aversion actually apparent between them is no aversion inherent in their nature; on the contrary, the essence of politics comprises the essence of the work of health, and the work of health is, after all, among the works from whose sum the work of politics is composed.

Therefore, to speak of politics and health, or of the politics of health, is entirely permissible; and we have the right to weigh, in speaking of it, the basic considerations upon which the health of the politics of health rests. It is no secret that to speak of politics in general means, inevitably, to speak of the responsibilities and duties of the government and of those in authority, more than of the responsibilities and duties of the people; that talking politics has become almost the specialty of the general public in our country, ahead of the professionals and those engaged in it; and that the physician — who, in matters of general politics, is one of the general public — is accordingly entitled to give his opinion on the politics of health at least. It should be understood, moreover, that if it were destined for the

Last month, Dr. Zaki Shakhashiri delivered this talk over Radio Lebanon, and the censor's pen was most guarded in passing over certain phrases — they are marked in black, and we draw the attention of our honored readers to them, in deference to the wish of the article's author.