Emma Rothschild writes about a new French book on the economics of illness

• L’Ordre Cannibale: Vie et Mort de la Médecine by Jacques Attali
  Grasset, 325 pp, ISBN 0 00 000097 3

One of the more mournful consequences of the economic crisis is the boom in the business of illness. This is in one sense a figure of speech. The economies of the West are evidently unwell: since 1973, they have been obsessed with the etiology of economic impairment, the electroencephalograms of unemployment and inflation. But it is also literally true.