Write a summary of the following passage in not more than 130 words.

I take it without argument that disease is evil and health is good. Until recently health was not a State concern. Each man pursued it for himself. He could get a doctor to help him, if he could afford it. He could combine voluntarily with other individuals for treatment or exercise, if he could afford it. Voluntary societies, from charitable or benevolent motives, might help to bring health to those who had not got it and could not afford to pay.

Why did the State suddenly enter this field? It was not merely that some people were too poor to afford doctors and, unaided by any benevolent association, were neglected and diseased. This might have justified greater activity by the benevolent and its extension on non-sectarian lines to all deserving cases, but it would not have made health necessarily a State concern. It was not merely that the cash nexus gave the whole medical profession an interest, not in keeping people well, but in keeping them ill, with the inevitable evils of unnecessary operations, treatment determined by the patient's purse and so on. This might have been met by rising standards of professional conduct, and an extension of the readiness, already widely found in country practices, to do good work for the poor for little or nothing.

No doubt these methods could never have entirely removed the abuses nor given the poor any real chance of efficient attention or adequate treatment.

But there was one factor which made State action in medicine more than an attempt to protect the rich hypochondriac from exploitation or the poor patient from neglect and inefficiency. This factor was the germ theory of disease, with the consequent recognition that no man by his own efforts can achieve health in an unhealthy community, that my own health is endangered unless my neighbour is compelled to keep his premises sanitary and to isolate his infectious cases. It is endangered also if those things which I cannot supply for myself - gas, water and roads - are not kept clean. Just as no individual and no voluntary association can prevent murder and insecurity, so neither of these can control the incidence of plague or typhoid or diphtheria. Freedom from disease can be achieved only by State action.

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