One winter's morning 24 years ago, I had a meeting with an elderly man in a basement room near St Paul's Cathedral. He made me lie on a hard bed, hit my knees with a rubber hammer and peered into my mouth. He then shone a light into my ears, put a metal implement on my chest and pressed his fingers into my stomach. Had I been a man I would have suffered the further indignity of having to pull my pants down and cough so that he could cup his hand around my balls.
In those days we did not think twice about it. This was a medical check that everyone had to pass in order to get an office job. We didn't wonder whether the condition of our tonsils - or balls - was our employers' business or what it had to do with our ability to write news stories about company profits. Those were simple times. We understood that our medical details were confidential in the sense that they weren't a topic for general discussion; but we also understood that if the test had thrown up something sinister (which it seldom did as it was so perfunctory) our employers would be perfectly entitled to say they didn't want to hire us after all.
Now the relationship between our health and our employment is far more murky, and none of us seems to understand it at all.