Illness Does Not Equal Personal Failure

(SeaPRwire) –   Earlier this year, I visited San Francisco’s spectacular Palace of the Legion of Honor art museum with my sister. We had a wonderful time, but my sister lives with a chronic autoimmune condition that limits how long she can stand and walk. So after roughly an hour, we made our way to the lounge area and settled in, only to quickly realize we were not welcome there.

Lung congestion is one symptom of her condition, which causes regular coughing fits. One of these fits hit right as we sat down. To several people nearby, her coughing spasms were clearly an offensive imposition.

At first, we only received judgmental sidelong glances. Then a few people began shifting restlessly while glaring, wordlessly making their frustration clear. Finally, after my sister had been coughing heavily for around three minutes, one man stood up, stared at us with obvious anger on his face, and stormed off. The unspoken message was clear: being unwell in public was shameful, a rude affront to others.

We picked up on the hostile energy and left right away.

The brief embarrassment from that afternoon faded quickly, but the widespread belief that being sick is a personal failing has far broader consequences. When Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. claims that “it’s very, very difficult for measles to kill a healthy person” (a statement that is misleading at best), many people interpret this to mean that anyone who suffers severe outcomes from measles is at fault for their own condition. “We see a correlation between people who get hurt by measles,” he said, “and people who don’t have good nutrition or who don’t have a good exercise regimen.”

The idea that each individual is responsible for their own well-being is far from new. Illness has long been viewed as a reflection of a person’s character, and even their moral values. But when Kennedy suggested that exercising and avoiding junk food will protect people from the worst effects of measles, he unfairly shifts blame onto those who do become seriously ill from the disease. This line of thinking also pushes the narrative that each person is fully in control of their own health fate, and that eating well and exercising are almost all that is needed to avoid sickness.

It is a very small step from that mindset to the extremely dangerous attack on public health being waged by Kennedy and the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement he leads: the anti-vaccine crusade that threatens U.S. acceptance of one of the world’s most impactful life-saving inventions.

Naturally, Kennedy did not originate the idea that good health is proof of a well-lived life. The belief that people with healthy lifestyle habits can easily fend off disease stretches back through the entire history of medicine. In 1721, London and Boston faced concurrent large-scale smallpox outbreaks. A small group of pioneering medical practitioners responded with variolation: a process where material from the sores of already infected people is scratched into the skin of volunteers who have not yet contracted the disease. This early form of vaccination was far from risk-free, but it worked for most people who received it.

For opponents of the practice, however, this approach reflected a fundamental misunderstanding of why people get sick. The Reverend Edmond Massey, delivering a sermon in the middle of London’s outbreak, summed up the core of these objections. Massey told his congregation that smallpox was God’s way of forcing sinners to “examine themselves for what cause this evil is come upon them.”

A smallpox infection was seen as a window into a person’s soul; people believed sin had caused each person to fall ill, which meant that repentance was the only path to possible recovery. Boston’s city leaders subscribed to this belief, and in late June, they called for a city-wide day of penance and fasting to address the outbreak.

Predictably, the smallpox virus was completely unaffected by these acts of piety. In Boston, roughly 300 residents chose to try the new variolation procedure. Only six of these people died during the epidemic. But more than half the city’s population – around 5,900 people – skipped variolation and contracted the disease. At least 850 of them died as a result.

Over the next two centuries, however, even as explicit religious justifications for this view became less common, the core belief remained unchanged: health was a moral choice, achieved by adopting the right lifestyle habits. Naturally, this meant that if someone did get sick, it was a sign of personal failure. For example, consider the comments made by Walt Whitman, a very unexpected early wellness influencer, in his 1858 series titled “Manly Health and Training.”

Whitman shared a wide range of unusual health advice: avoid ketchup, eat rare beef, maintain “a cheerful and gay temper during and immediately after meals,” among other tips. But he echoed the same core messaging that modern health influencers push on the key question of what causes illness. “The cause of disease,” he wrote, “is bad blood, often hereditary, more often from persistence in bad habits.” In his view, there was no need to rely on conventional medicine, since “the great requisites of health being good air, proper food, and appropriate exercise.”

Henry Lindlahr, one of the most influential naturopathic writers of the early 20^th century, argued that vaccinations turned “the human body a swill pot for the collection of all sorts of disease taints and poisonous antiseptics and germicides.” By contrast, he claimed good health could be achieved via natural remedies and “by cultivating the right mental attitude.”

The belief that good health is purely a matter of willpower has always been an appealing idea, as it gives people the sense that they have full control over their own outcomes. But this is an illusion. No amount of positive thinking or healthy eating can stop all illnesses from causing potentially life-threatening harm.