On: US government is pushing to gain unprecedented access to your medical records - ...

This morning’s news of the government’s reach for medical records reminds me of a physician I once knew - brilliant, meticulous, but who insisted on examining his patients without their consent, convinced his own judgment outweighed their privacy. He called it “diagnostic necessity.” The cases piled up, of course - women who would rather suffer in silence than submit to his scrutiny, men who vanished from his practice altogether. His clinic’s records grew vast, but his understanding? Stunted.

Now the state plays physician, gathering files with the same misplaced confidence. Large datasets can illuminate, yes - I’ve traced patterns in fever charts that saved lives - but only when the hand that collects respects the boundary of the body it studies. Strip away consent, and the data turns necrotic: swollen with numbers, starved of trust.

I think of the puerperal fever cases again. The doctors who carried death on their hands because they refused to see their own role in the pattern. Power, unexamined, is its own disease. And here we are again: a government prescribing surveillance as if privacy were merely a symptom to be treated, not the pulse of a free society. The prognosis? Look to the resistance - not in the streets, but in the silence of those who will now hide their ailments rather than bare them to an unblinking eye.

The breakfast table ought to be a place of confidence, not compliance.