Senator John McCain has been to see his dermatologist. She removed a small patch of skin from his right cheek. Apparently, she does this frequently. He wore a small bandage for a few hours, then took it off. This is all known because the senator informed the press.

The British have a phrase for use when provided with such detailed intelligence about a medical procedure - “that's too much information”. In the United States, they do not agree. Even medical information that appears simultaneously banal and intrusive is not seen as surplus to requirements. The intimate personal details of a president or a presidential hopeful's health are regarded as important information, part of the public's right to know.

So who is right? The Americans with their unblushing reports that border on the invasive, or the British who display more traditional reticence? Undoubtedly, the Americans.

The removal of Mr McCain's mole was elevated into a news story because of his history with skin cancer and because his age, however unfairly, has raised questions about his ability to deal with the rigours of the presidency. In May, the Republican candidate authorised a fuller report on his condition to be issued in an attempt to answer such questions. Yet it is not necessary to be over 70 to have a medical condition that might have an impact on your conduct in high office.

The work of modern historians, franker and more personal in their accounts than was the custom in the past, has shown how often the occupants of high office have been seriously debilitated by illness. From Woodrow Wilson's stroke to Dwight Eisenhower's heart attack; from John Kennedy's Addison's disease to François Mitterrand's terminal cancer; from Winston Churchill's repeated strokes to Anthony Eden's botched operation - the story of the 20th century is easier to comprehend when the health of its main protagonists is taken into account.

Would the Suez crisis, for instance, have progressed as it did if Eden had been fit? Would the Yalta conference have had the same outcome if Roosevelt had not been so ill? How might the history of Clement Attlee's Government been different if two of its biggest figures were not dying?

It is not simply the conditions themselves that impact upon the behaviour of statesmen - it is the treatment for the conditions. In his valuable book In Sickness and in Power, Lord Owen, the former Foreign Secretary, argues plausibly that President Kennedy's drug use had an adverse impact on his behaviour during his first summit meeting with Nikita Khrushchev and on his management of the Bay of Pigs invasion.

Yet this lesson of history - the lesson that the health of statesman is of first-rate importance - remains, in this country at least, largely unlearnt. In an era where transparency is insisted upon for quite small amounts of money, it is not insisted upon over quite serious physical conditions. At the last election, the Liberal Democrats covered up their leader's alcoholism. Tony Blair, meanwhile, was less than open about his heart condition - according to close associates, he had had the problem for far longer than he suggested at the time.

To the British the frankness of Mr McCain, and the media's interest in it, seems strange. It will be a good day when it ceases to appear so.