The American President’s physician has proclaimed his charge in ‘excellent health’. One imagines the Queen’s own doctors would have couched such a verdict in rather more nuanced terms, perhaps noting that His Majesty’s humours are tolerably balanced given the burdens of state. But in Washington, it is all vigorous handshakes and brisk walks. The message is clear: the Leader is robust, the nation is robust, and any suggestion otherwise is unpatriotic chatter.
Yet across the Atlantic, our own medical establishment has raised a sceptical eyebrow. The BBC quotes several eminent British doctors questioning the ‘full transparency’ of the report. They mutter about undisclosed tests, omitted details, the troubling precedent of a head of state whose health is treated as state secret. One cannot help but feel that we are witnessing the spectacle of the Roman imperial physician declaring Augustus in splendid fettle, while the Senate whispers of epilepsy and the army mutters about lost battles.
There is something deeply unsettling in this transatlantic divergence. The Americans, for all their professed love of transparency, have a long tradition of veiling the frailties of their leaders. Franklin Roosevelt’s polio was hidden from the public. John F. Kennedy’s Addison’s disease was masked by steroids. Woodrow Wilson’s stroke was effectively covered up by his wife. The list is as long as it is dishonourable. Now, we are asked to accept that a man of considerable years, with a diet of fast food and a schedule that would exhaust a man half his age, is in ‘excellent health’. It smacks less of medicine and more of political propaganda.
Our British doctors, with their instinctive distrust of executive overreach, are right to demand more. Health is not merely the absence of disease; it is the capacity to discharge the duties of office. To claim excellent health without releasing the raw data is like a Victorian factory owner asserting the moral health of his workforce while refusing to inspect the sanitation. It is the arrogance of a ruling class that believes itself above scrutiny.
One is reminded of Edward Gibbon’s observation that the decline of Rome was hastened by the emperors’ isolation from reality, surrounded by sycophants who told them only what they wished to hear. The American presidency, with its imperial trappings and court-like press corps, is in danger of the same fate. A doctor’s report that reads like a press release, designed to reassure rather than inform, is a symptom of this malady.
But let us not be too smug. Our own body politic has its secrets. The British Establishment is hardly a model of openness when it comes to the health of its monarchs. Yet the difference is one of degree: we at least admit that a king is a man, and that a man may be ill. The American system, with its cult of the presidency, cannot bear the thought of weakness. It must present a facade of invulnerability, even when the cracks are visible to all.
The real question is not whether the President is healthy, but why we are so desperate to believe he is. In an age of anxiety, we cling to the fiction of the vigorous leader who will guide us through the storm. But history teaches that such fictions are dangerous. The Roman Republic fell in part because its citizens preferred the comforting lies of Augustus to the hard truths of Cicero.
So I say, let us welcome the scepticism of our British doctors. Let us demand that the American President release his full medical records, not a carefully crafted summary. Let us remember that transparency is not a sign of weakness but of strength. And let us, above all, resist the temptation to treat our leaders as gods, for even gods have clay feet. The truth may be uncomfortable, but it is the only foundation upon which a healthy republic can be built.
