Professor Haun Saussy, from the University of Chicago and a leading scholar of Chinese and comparative literature, delivers the second lecture in the 2014 De Carle Lecture series. Western political philosophy, at its beginning (Plato's Republic), introduces an analogy between medical treatment and political reform that, like all metaphors, has consequences on both the supposedly different domains that it incorporates. As long as the metaphor is viewed as a mere analogy, however, the practical relation of medicine to state survival is obscured. The historical development, through a series of political theorists, some of them physicians, explains the in-between status of the field of public health. 22 September 2014