Cohort

“ In the 12th annual report of William Farr, Esq., to the Registrar General of England, we are told “it may be broadly stated that 27 in 1000 men of the population of the age of 20 and under 60, are suffering from one kind of disease or another; that several are of long duration, that others are recurrent, and that some are hereditary.” ”

“ Still the patients are men and women who have had their portion, more or less, of interest in the doings of the great family of man. They have had their season of health, and must be able to find some consolation in the recollection of how it has been with them once upon a time. Moreover, they are every one marked out for seclusion by disease, actually incapacitated for active life before they are withdrawn from it. ”

“ Thus the individual, the family, the people which possess by nature the soundest and best-balanced organizations, will have, other things being equal, the greatest aggregate amount of health. Not only this, but they will secure the longest lives. This same standard of physiology, then, affords the material upon which the law of longevity is based. A careful examination of the organization of all those persons who reach a great age, we believe, will demonstrate that they naturally possessed a remarkably healthy and evenly balanced constitution. ”

“ The last century had very little to show, in our State, in the way of medical literature. The worthies who took care of our grandfathers and great-grandfathers, like the Revolutionary heroes, fought (with disease) and bled (their patients) and died (in spite of their own remedies) ; but their names, once familiar, are heard only at rare intervals. Honored in their day, not unremembered by a few solitary students of the past, their memories are going sweetly to sleep in the arms of the patient old dry-nurse, whose “blackdrop” is the never-failing anodyne of the restless generations of men. ”

“ We are further told by the Registrar-General that "the returns of the past quarter prove that nothing effectual has been done to put a stop to the disease, suffering, and death in which so many thousands perish; that the improvements, chiefly of a showy, superficial, outside character, have not reached the homes and habits of the people ”

“ May I venture to contrast youth and experience in medical practice, something in the way the man painted the lion, that is, the lion under?
The young man knows the rules, but the old man knows the exceptions. The young man knows his patient, but the old man knows also his patient's family, dead and alive, up and down for generations. He can tell beforehand what diseases their unborn children will be subject to, what they will die of if they live long enough, and whether they had better live at all, or remain unrealized possibilities, as belonging to a stock not worth being perpetuated. ”

“ The people who lived to be old represented the disease-resistant strain of their generation and on account of their superior fecundity this quality is distributed largely throughout the population. “A very large proportion of each generation is sprung from a very small proportion of the preceding generation; namely, from the people who lived to old age. The members of the short-lived group come from the short-lived parents. The children of the long-lived parents are on the average stronger, more vigorous, and longer-lived than the children of others, and there were more of them per family.” ”

“ But as the disease of old age is epidemic, endemic, and sporadic, and everybody that lives long enough is sure to catch it, I am going to say, for the encouragement of such as need it, how I treat the malady in my own case. ”

“ A cause common to a whole class is often, however, not manifest in particular individuals, but is yet visible in the pallor and the reduced sum of vitality of the whole class, or in the average duration of life in that class, as compared with the average duration of life of another class similarly situated, in all respects except in the exposure to that one cause. [5] The effects of a cause of depression on a class are sometimes visible in the greater fatality of common accidents. An excess of mortality to a class is almost always found, on examination, to be traceable to an adequate cause. ”

“ Here the younger, whose constitution appears to have been originally much stronger than that of her sister, seems to have improved rapidly in health, and in so doing to have mastered, in some degree, that morbid sympathy of temperament of which I have spoken, and which in the weaker organisation of her elder sister, still maintained its former ascendency. They were about six years old when, whether through the carelessness of the nurse or not, is immaterial to us now, the younger was lost during a pleasure excursion in the neighbourhood. ”

“ There is a Fifth class, whom Disease has wasted and reduced so that there is scarcely life enough to make it at all desirable; and a morbid melancholy, almost utter despair, follows. They have frighful dreams, flashes, headaches, palpitations, anger fits, hysteria, and angularities without number. A Sixth class have gone to waste, impotence, and senility, at 30, 35, and 40 years of age, who with a little care could retain full vigor till threescore years and ten!
The above list embraces, 1st. All that vast mass of people who are exhausted by mental labor and sedentary occupations ”

“ We certainly have not yet heard the last word from zoölogy which, while stressing the hereditary factors, for example, and individual longevity, must admit that old age in general is a more or less acquired character. ”

“ That is, the persons were born and brought up, and will be born and brought up, generation after generation, in the conditions which make paupers. Death and disease are like the workhouse, they take from the same family, the same house, or in other words the same conditions. ”

“ And if it be necessary to observe propriety of conduct towards the dead, how careful should you be in your behaviour to the living—your poor, sick, suffering fellow-creatures, at whose bedside you are permitted to watch the ravages of disease, and to contemplate the approach of death. ”

“ Less death, more disease—that is the sad, the unnatural record; children especially—so sensitive to the physician's art—living on by hundreds of thousands, bearing within them the germs of wide-spreading sorrow, who in former times would have died. ”

“ Out of their own immediate circle of relations and friends, they hear only of the severe cases of disease, and often only of those in which death is the result, and know but little, perhaps nothing, of the multitude of cases, here and there in every part of the community, which end in recovery. ”

“ The dependency of the duration of life upon the physical condition of the population, and the connexion of several classes of moral and economical facts, with the proportionate mortality, may be further exemplified. ”

“ Who knows how much inherited tendencies in certain ancestors, the poor state of Father’s and Mother’s health before and at the time of his birth, and that critical illness when a lad, may have had to do with giving him an organization seriously hampered from the beginning? ”

“ The sight of men, who all bore in their hearts, the remembrance of the faults, of a husband, of a father, could not be an object which they would be desirous of seeking, or meeting with; and in this point of view, the care, which they took to avoid the hospital, seems to us almost pardonable. ”

“ Where the pressure of the causes of mortality is the greatest; where the average age of death is the lowest, and the duration of life is the shortest, there the increase of population is the greatest. The proportion of children is great because life is short and the generation transient; the middle aged and the aged are swept away in large proportions ”

“ Let the ripe age be supposed of twenty-one years, and their period of life thirty-four years more, that being the average term given by the bills of mortality to persons of twenty-one years of age. Each successive generation would, in this way, come and go off the stage at a fixed moment, as individuals do now. ”

“ In a large family it was very rare when one or more of the members did not die, and thus growing youth was brought in contact with the greatest mystery in life, that of death. Very frequently at least one of the household and sometimes more, had to go through a period of severe suffering with which the others were brought in daily contact. ”

“ It appeared worth while to describe diseases which are propagated on the beams of light—on the wings of thought; which convulse the mind by the excitement of the senses, and wonderfully affect the nerves, the media of its will and of its feelings. It seemed worth while to attempt to place these disorders between the epidemics of a less refined origin, which affect the body more than the soul, and all those passions and emotions which border on the vast domain of disease, ready at every moment to pass the boundary. ”

“ That the habit in this instance, as in most others of the kind, should have been hereditary, was what the Doctor would have expected: good constitutions and ill habits of body are both so;—two things which seldom co-exist, but this obstinate longevity, as he called it, was proof both of the one and the other. ”

“ A great medical expert said to me not long ago, "There is not more than one family in ten who can show a clean bill of health, mental and physical—aye, and moral—from hereditary taints that are serious in threat and almost certain of development in one form or another. ”

“ Chronic Decline, with its attendant anæmia, may be induced by bad habits, destitution, or constitutional depravity. Sickly forms, wrecks of health, address our senses on every side. All these subjects evidently once had a capital in life, sufficient, if properly and carefully husbanded, to comfortably afford them vital stamina and length of days. ”

“ The universal brotherhood of man appeared before him, and it smelt of mortality—no partial, exclusive mortality, but a mortality comprehensive, universal, condensed and averaged up from the grand totality of items. ”

“ We are forever wandering up and down. Few of us are satisfied to remain long in the same place, among the same surroundings—and in this way the foundations of home life,—formerly so noble and firm a part of our national strength—are being shaken and disorganized. A very great majority of us appear to be afflicted with the chronic disease of Hurry, which generally breeds a twin ailment—Worry. ”

“ The society still meet every night at my quarters, and though we have lost many by death, others are raised up in their room; one officer, a lieutenant, is also given to me; and he is not only a brother beloved, but a constant companion and nurse; so you must feel no apprehension that I should be left alone in sickness ”

“ Old age, infirmities, and poverty, joined, are afflictions enough. The neglect and slights of friends and near relations should never be added. People in her circumstances are apt to suspect this sometimes without cause; appearances should therefore be attended to, in our conduct towards them, as well as realities. ”

“ You are wrong not to keep up your old acquaintances. I know at least a hundred people of the first rank who are suffering from the same malady as that of which you cured me, and would give the half of their goods to be cured. ”

“ A fearful truth for medical men has been established by the table of mortality by Dr. Casper, published in the British Review. Of 1000 members of the medical profession, 600 died before their sixty-second year; while of persons leading a quiet life—such as agriculturists or theologians—the mortality is only 347. ”

“ The beloved father of a family lies upon a bed of sickness, and disease is fast gaining upon the powers of life. His numerous and desolate family, in spite of the cold suggestion that it will be of no avail, will earnestly beseech the Being in whose hands is the power of disease, to arrest the fatal malady. ”

“ Sometimes a short cough struck upon her ear, and her heart would go out in sympathy with some hectic invalids who, with the invariable desire of consumptive patients to appear better than they are, would sink exhausted on one of the benches, and then start up again to walk with a gaily dressed beau to the strains of the band playing under the row of trees before the houses. ”

“ Under the old system the health and constitution of many of the young people were irretrievably destroyed. At present permanent loss of health is rarely entailed, and even when sickness does from any cause arise, skilful and prompt advice and medicine are provided at a moderate charge by the association. ”

“ Of the incalculable amount of physical suffering and disablement which they occasion, and of the sorrows, and anxieties, the permanent darkening of life, the straitened means of such subsistence, the very frequent destitution and pauperism which attend or follow such suffering, death statistics testify only in sample or by suggestion. ”

“ There is nothing like occupation, active occupation, to cure slight pains—“constant occupation physics pain”—to drive away little ailments, and the dread of sickness. “The dread of sickness,” says Dr. Grosvenor, “is a distemper of itself, and the next disposition to a many more. What a bondage does this keep some people in! ’Tis an easy transition from the fear and fancy of being sick to sickness indeed. ”

“ Quite a new stress was laid on getting contributions from relatives, and on the most vigilant inquiry into circumstances, recommendations which certainly applied to the aged and infirm and to the sick, and which seemed to carry with them the hint that, if confronted with the workhouse, even the aged and the sick would be maintained by their relations. ”