Praise for illness

Drawing from a wealth of alarming and little-known facts, the Austrian medical journalist Bert Ehgartner paints a dire picture of our medicalised society where one in two families is affected by chronic diseases.

The trend towards avoiding even the most harmless infections and living in an increasingly sterile environment contributes to this development. Ehgartner's "Praise for illness", by contrast, describes the immune system in a completely new way: not as a rigid apparatus, but as "an individual's second learning ego" that protects us against infections and cancer - if we let it. If you are ill from time to time you will stay healthy in the long run!