Centenarian

“ THOUGH it must be granted even of the centenarian, as of all others, that he soon "passeth away and is gone," yet happily we are not obliged to admit that his "strength is but labor and sorrow." In many instances, on the contrary, he has, if not a green, yet a mellow and cheerful old age, one of happiness to himself and pleasure to others, brightened by a vivid though calm interest in the present, and unshadowed by apprehension of that which is to come. ”

“ Indeed, that the tough system of the centenarian has had no experience of neuralgic wear—that he is a man born without nerves—is, I fancy, one of the secrets of his longevity. To this and his inexhaustible good-humor may mainly be attributed, I have no doubt, his duration under all sorts of hard usage by poverty and exposure.
A man one hundred and three years old, seeing his own likeness for the first time, was a dramatic moment, I thought—but Billy evidently did not feel the poetry of it. ”

“ It is a rather remarkable fact in connection with the examples of longevity cited that in almost every instance the centenarian is a person in the humblest rank of life. According to the compilers of these records, France can claim the honor of having possessed the oldest woman of modern times. This venerable dame, having attained one hundred and fifty years, died peacefully in a hamlet in the Haute Garonne, where she had spent her prolonged existence, subsisting during the closing decade of her life on goat's milk and cheese. ”

“ Henry glanced hastily at the mirror. Yes, he did look rather old. He must have overdone some of the lines on his forehead. He looked something between a youngish centenarian and a nonagenarian who had seen a good deal of trouble. ”

“ Every age has produced a few long-lived men, and here and there a centenarian."
"The question of importance is not whether this age is yielding more centenarians than former ages, but whether, on the average, the age of man is longer than it was, and if so, how much longer? The grounds for an increased longevity—better doctors and more of them, better drainage, more wholesome food, wiser habits, and better facilities for [Pg 73] securing change of air—justify the belief that life is lengthening, to what degree it is hard to say. ”

“ The centenarian generally comes of a long-lived family, and is a person of active habits, both of body and mind, a good sleeper, endowed with a good appetite, and a tranquil, cheerful disposition. One centenarian collier had always drunk as much as he could, and expressed his intention of continuing this habit, but all the others were stated either to have been moderate or very moderate in the indulgence of this taste or to have been total abstainers. ”

“ There is nothing so comforting to the middle-aged as a stroll through a cemetery of centenarians; and I had the most uncharitable feelings against the person who could make such an attempt to deprive me of the pleasant hope of living another sixty or seventy years. ”

“ Careful investigation has thrown doubt almost amounting to disproof on the much-quoted cases of great longevity, such as that of Thomas Parr, the Shropshire peasant, who was supposed to have reached his hundred and fifty-third year, and, although the existence of centenarians is thoroughly established, any ages exceeding a hundred by more than two or three years are, at the most, dubious. ”

“ II.—THE CENTENARIANS More recently still another busybody endeavoured to deprive the village of the reputation which it had long enjoyed as the centre of English longevity. Now it would be impossible for any one to study the dates on the tombstones in the churchyard without noticing how great was the number of centenarians who died within the first fifty years of the nineteenth century in the parish of Thurswell. There were apparently eighteen men and fourteen women interred after passing their hundredth year ”

“ The people were naturally very proud of the constant references made in print to their longevity; but one day there came down to the village a member of the Statistical Society, and after busying himself among the musty parish registers for a month, he announced his discovery that in every case but one the date of the birth of the alleged centenarians was the date of the birth of their parents. The investigator had noticed that all the alleged centenarians had “departed this life” during the rectorship of the Rev. Thomas Ticehurst, and centenarianism had always been his fad. ”

“ According to the census of Germany, December, 1875, there were 160 persons over 100 years of age, of whom there was one woman of 115 years, and another of 117, one man of 118, and another of 120. Our own country has a better record of longevity than this.
Let us rest content with the fact that the world has many centenarians, and that we too are free to live a hundred years, if our ancestors have done their duty in transmitting a good constitution, and we have done our duty in preserving it. ”

“ Some years ago I became interested in cases of extreme longevity, particularly of centenarianism, and for some months every conversation seemed to lead to this topic, and every magazine and newspaper offered some new item about old people. ”

“ But if one lives to seventy he soon gets used to the text with the threescore years and ten in it, and begins to count himself among those who by reason of strength are destined to reach fourscore, of whom he can see a number still in reasonably good condition. The octogenarian loves to read about people of ninety and over. He peers among the asterisks of the triennial catalogue of the University for the names of graduates who have been seventy years out of college and remain still unstarred. He is curious about the biographies of centenarians. ”

“ As to whether the proportion of great longevities is increasing or diminishing, we have information only for France. During the fourteen years, from 1823 to 1837, the mean annual number of persons dying centenarians was 152, or one for 217,105 inhabitants; during the eight years, from 1852 to 1860, the mean was 111 in a population that had increased twenty per cent. But, although the great ages seem to have diminished, the mean length of life has very sensibly increased, and this is much better. ”

“ The clearness of his mind and the vigor of his limbs indicated that he was likely to be one of those centenarians who carry their years so lightly that they make us think with regret of that golden age in which the gods could confer immortality upon man. ”

“ Some said that the young woman the boys saw with the old man was a relative, others declared that she was merely a guard stationed to secure the secret should the centenarian by any chance let it drop unawares. ”

“ The series of fifty-two cases of reputed centenarians got together by the Collective Investigation Committee has been analyzed by Professor Humphry, of Cambridge, who is able to state positively that, in eleven cases, two males and nine females, the evidence left no doubt that these old people were really centenarians. ”

“ Perhaps the most interesting fact which has come out of the analysis of these cases is that, though centenarians, as a rule, have not suffered much from illness during their long lives, yet a considerable number of instances were met with where even severe illnesses had been recovered from at an advanced age. ”

“ All these centenarians, without exception, have been found among the humbler classes, and most of them among peasants—that is to say, among the workers of the community who lead quiet, regular, and busy lives. ”

“ Statistics show that at the end of the septennial period, 1881-’87, 400,000 persons were alive in England and Wales whose death would have taken place had the mortality been in the same proportion as during the previous decade. It may be reasonably expected that as time goes on there will be an increase in the proportion of centenarians to the population as a whole.
The question whether long life is, after all, desirable does not admit of any general answer. ”

“ The old men, almost centenarians, whom we left in our dear native place, are living yet, and death has stricken down another victim, in the brightness of youth and future prospects, George D——, only six days older than I am, and who died far from his home. ”

“ Experts estimate that there are thirty to fifty thousand living centenarians, up from the 1980 estimate of fifteen thousand. Also, centenarians are not as feeble as they once were; disability rates among older people have been falling since the early 1980s. ”

“ A much more serious fact, and one that may be more reasonably admitted, is that of hereditary longevities, of which there are numerous examples. Most of these centenarians appear to have been temperate, only two instances of drunkards being known among them. Many of them were indefatigable walkers, traversing every day considerable distances to go to their work ”

“ Thirty centuries do not seem to have made any very great difference in the extreme limits of life. Without pretending to rival the alleged cases of life prolonged beyond the middle of its second century, such as those of Henry Jenkins and Thomas Parr, we can make a good showing of centenarians and nonagenarians. I myself remember Dr. Holyoke, of Salem, son of a president of Harvard College, who answered a toast proposed in his honor at a dinner given to him on his hundredth birthday. ”

“ Trendall, and thought that perhaps I might get material for a letter to the Times that should not leave the scientific investigator a leg to stand on. A month, however, elapsed before I carried out my intention, though the Rector thought this was not a case for procrastination: when a lady is anything over a hundred her hold upon life shows a tendency to relax, he said, for even the most notorious centenarians cannot be expected to live for ever. ”

“ According to a table we have calculated for fifteen countries of Europe, more women than men attain an extreme old age, and the difference increases with the age. The greatest number of persons over sixty years of age is found in France, but not the greatest number of centenarians. Calculating upon the given age at death, we have found the percentage of those among the deceased who were ninety years old and more to be, in Great Britain, 9·73 ”

“ He fully recognizes, too, the influence of mystic numbers here, which persisted until the age of the higher criticism, and is incredulous about most of the modern records of centenarians. His point of view is that man has now passed his acme and that a slow decline of the human race, which will end in its extinction, has already begun, masked as it is by modern hygiene, which prolongs life beyond the average term it would otherwise have reached. ”

“ Tempest.”
“Precisely. An interval of one hundred years is bound to embrace and cover [129] the whole period of any person’s life—to include his birth and his death.”
“How about the centenarians?”
“They are too rare to take into consideration.”
“Well, take it then, Tempest, that you are right. The hundred years is to cover some person’s life. Whose?”
“The life of some person born on the 18th of August, 1881. Now, Yardley, who was born on that day?” ”

“ The deference of the polloi to the extreme sections of old age is manifest likewise from the tablets and monuments you may any day stumble upon, that have been erected by public subscription to the memory of octogenarians, nonagenarians, and centenarians. ”

“ Several recent circumstances have fixed attention on the great prominence of Old Age as a feature of our time:—Old Age, not coddled in cotton-wool, and kept warm by the fireside, but active, intelligent, efficient, and agreeable;—not only venerable through wealth of years, but admirable in its own character. Physiologists and statisticians tell us that the longevity of our own nation improves,—a marked increase in the length of life having been established within this century ”

“ The paths of glory lead but to the grave. We are not, therefore, surprised at the implicit belief in such records in times gone by, when no populous village in England was without a man or woman of fourscore years old. It has, however, become of late a matter of some moment to inquire into the authority on which statements of extreme old age have usually rested; and the result has been to shake the testimony of many recorded cases of great longevity. ”

“ At fifty a man is wrinkled, and may be bald or gray;
I call men old at fifty, in spite of all they say.
At last comes another August with mist and rain and shine;
Its mornings are slowly counted and creep to twenty-nine,
And when on the western summits the fading light appears,
It touches with rosy fingers the last of my fifty years.
There have been both men and women whose hearts were firm and bold,
But there never was one of fifty that loved to say "I'm old;"
So any elderly person that strives to shirk his years,
Make him stand up at a table and try him by his peers. ”

“ As charity has always been praised as a virtue, it is now becoming also a science, and the peculiar nature and needs of old age are being better understood, although there is yet very much to be done in studying this stage of life which has in the past been so neglected and misunderstood. We are now far more ignorant of senescence than of adolescence, childhood, or middle age, but it is quite as unique, on the whole, and more apart than any of these other periods. ”

“ With song, wit and wassail, and true hearts anigh.
⁠Centuria, Centuria, vivat Centuria!
Then love as they loved when thine eldest was young,
⁠Centuria!
O the comrades that gossipped and painted and sung,
O the smoke-cloud that lingers their places among!
⁠Centuria, Centuria, vivat Centuria!
And sing as they'll sing in thy fair years untold,
⁠Centuria,
Strong hearts that shall follow, as tender and bold;
We may fade, we shall pass, but thou growest not old ”

“ I have witnessed every sort of dutiful and beautiful care of the aged; and none with more respect and admiration than that in which the children—themselves elderly—have been the managers, as well as the nurses, of their parents; yet I have never got over the painful kind of surprise of the spectacle,—the violation of all one’s associations of deference with age, and one’s feelings of the sacredness of the liberty and the will of one’s elders. ”