Sir Edmund Leach argues that doctors in the modern world, fortified by the traditional concept that the life of the sick person must at all costs be preserved, are to some extent guilty of the false antitheses current today between youth and age. Moreover youth means health, age illness and senility. Until this imbalance is corrected society will be in danger of `a kind of civil war between the generations'. Society must be taught again that mortality cannot be avoided or (...) conquered by medical science, and at the same time that `health' is not enshrined in the young alone. (shrink)