Even more disturbing, to those who knew about it, was the untimely demise of John H. Knowles, director of the Rockefeller Foundation and promulgator of what became known as the “doctrine of personal responsibility” for one’s health. Most illnesses are self-inflicted, he argued—the result of “gluttony, alcoholic intemperance, reckless driving, sexual frenzy, and smoking,”4 as well as other bad choices. The “idea of a ‘right’ to health,” he wrote, “should be replaced by the idea of an individual moral obligation to preserve one’s own health.” But he died of pancreatic cancer at the age of
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