Abstract ‘The world . . . is not an inn, but a hospital ‘, said Sir Thomas Browne more than three and half centuries ago, in 1643. That is a discouraging, if not entirely surprising, interpretation of the world from the distinguished author of Religio Medici and Pseudodoxia Epidemica. But Browne may not be entirely wrong: even today (not just in Browne ‘s seventeenth-century England), illness of one kind or another is an important presence in the lives of a great many people. Indeed, Browne may have been somewhat optimistic in his invoking of a hospital: many of the people who are most ill in the world today get no treatment for their ailments, nor the use of effective means of prevention.