'How are you?': what do you mean?

摘要

For Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, a French writer and distinguished amateur of food, 'What is health? It is chocolate!' ('Qu'est-ce que la sante? C'est du chocolat!').1 Interviewing Henry David Thoreau, the problem of how to measure health would be solved as follows: 'Measure your health by your sympathy with morning and spring'.2 For Balzac, at the end of the XlXth Century, a woman over 30 years of age could expect little from life and should consider herself as elderly, or at least, she had to persuade herself that this was so.3 What answer would these persons have given to the question, 'How is your health in general?', which is included in the OECD Health Data? Obviously, in the first examples cited health would have been governed by very specific conditions and the expectations of Balzac's heroine, Julie d'Aiglemont, would have been veiy low.