I can already tell this book will be an interesting one filled with conversations about how modern medicine is not all that it’s cracked up to be simply because of the lack of emphasis on the individual.
There are a lot of different conversation topics from this chapter: the individual, modern health tactics, and the background of Terman’s experiment overall, but the one that I found most interesting was the short point about how in the past, medicine had a religious foundation, so when someone got sick, a priest or religious leader would judge their sickness through their sins and accomplishments. The intro and first chapter had a large emphasis on how modern research tells us a number of factors that are the most important such as activity, marital status, and diet, but that those factors are only half the story. I’m very intrigued to hear more about the lives of individual “Termites”.