Lifespan

“ To be tending towards death from five-and-forty seems to them ridiculous. So it would be as a matter of sentiment, among people who think about death in such an exaggerated way as we, of this age, do. But I am here speaking of the natural facts which bear upon the condition of old age; and that is my concern with forty-five. In a rough way, the physiological distribution of our life is set down as including five-and-twenty years of growth, five-and-twenty of decline, and twenty of maturity between them. ”

“ III. I shall enumerate its peculiar diseases, and the remedies which are most proper to remove, or moderate them.
I. The circumstances which favour longevity, are,
1. Descent from long-lived ancestors. I have not found a single instance of a person, who has lived to be 80 years old, in whom this was not the case. In some instances I found the descent was only from one, but, in general, it was from both parents. The knowledge of this fact may serve, not only to assist in calculating what are called the chances of lives, but it may be made useful to a physician. ”

“ We are told by good authority that a study of the human body, its structure, and the length of time it takes it to come to maturity, in comparison with the time it takes the bodies of various animals and their corresponding longevity, reveals the fact that its natural age should be nearer a hundred and twenty years than what we commonly find it today. But think of the multitudes all about us whose bodies are aging, weakening, breaking, so that they have to abandon them long before they reach what ought to be a long period of strong, vigorous middle life. ”

“ He has suggested further that if the normal specific longevity were attained by human beings, old and not degenerate individuals would lose the instinct for life and acquire an instinct for death, and that as they had fulfilled the normal cycle of life, they would accept death with the same relieved acquiescence that they now accept sleep. ”

“ So, too, we speak of middle age and think vaguely of it as half way between birth and death or between adolescence and senescence. If we think of life as a binomial curve rising from a base line at birth and sinking into it at death, midway is the highest point with the longest ordinate; and as the crest of a wave has its spindrift, so life at this point often foams, or at least shows emulsive tendencies. We come in sight of the descent while the ascent behind is still visible. ”

“ Personal Habits.—According to Hufeland and other authorities on longevity, sobriety, regular habits, labor in the open air, exercise short of fatigue, calmness of mind, moderate intellectual power, and a family life are among the chief aids to longevity. For this reason we find the extraordinary instances of longevity among those people who amidst bodily labor and in the open air lead a simple life, agreeable to nature. Such are farmers, gardeners, hunters, soldiers, and sailors. In these situations man may still maintain the age of one hundred and fifty or even one hundred and sixty. ”

“ Now it takes the human animal twenty years at least to grow to maturity; therefore the human animal really should live five times twenty years, which makes a round hundred or a CENTURY; and I firmly believe it is intended for him to live that long, if he only acted in accordance with the laws of life and health. And, dear uncle, you seem always to have acted so, and therefore I think you may safely calculate upon living out your century and then dying the gentle death of mere old age. ”

“ Before we advert to the nature of our adaptations for this period of life, we must draw a distinction between age and "premature old age." The former is the decline of nature, which must always take place, whilst the latter is the result of disease or improper habits. ”

“ It is very presumptuous to attempt to add to it, yet I have been struck with the fact that life admits of a natural analysis into no less than fifteen distinct periods. Taking the five primary divisions, infancy, childhood, youth, manhood, old age, each of these has its own three periods of immaturity, complete development, and decline. I recognize on old baby at once, - with its “pipe and mug,” (a stick of candy and a porringer,) - so does everybody; and an old child shedding its milk-teeth is only a little prototype of the old man shedding his permanent ones. ”

“ Believing profoundly that involution is just as interesting a phase of life as evolution and not being satisfied with the poems, essays, and meditations of literary men and women who have addressed the public on the theme of senescence, which are, as we saw in a former chapter, often more or less hortatory, consolatory, or else were composed as exercises to hearten themselves against the great enemy, it seemed worth while to try to seek a new contact with the fresh spontaneous thoughts and feelings of normal old people concerning their estate. ”

“ As a psychologist I am convinced that the psychic states of old people have great significance. Senescence, like adolescence, has its own feelings, thoughts, and wills, as well as its own physiology, and their regimen is important, as well as that of the body. Individual differences here are probably greater than in youth. ”

“ Our streets, buildings, machines, farms, mines, goods, produce, means of transportation—all these are, in a sense, the bequest of vanished and retiring to future generations, and even whatever stamina their children have is more or less due to their virtue, while their very longevity is perhaps the best of all they have transmitted to their offspring for, as A. G. Bell has shown, fecundity and long life go together. ”

“ But see here, my lad! our bodies are built to last three score and ten years. Some linger to an hundred; but so few beyond, that every month of continued [24] being renders them more and more a sort of prodigies. As the end of a long life approaches—say a life of ninety years—there is such decay, such dry-rot, that the whole frame is but one remove from ashes. ”

“ Premature death is in the marrow of their bones, the seeds of early dissolution are sown in their bodies, they feel old at fifty, sixty, and seventy years, when they should feel like boys of fifteen, sixteen, and seventeen. Instead of feeling decrepit at those years they should feel full of strength, vigor, and life, having attained to early maturity, prepared now to enter upon the duties of a long future life, and when two hundred years have been attained, they should then feel more vigorous than the healthiest of men do in this age at forty and fifty years. ”

“ During the first years of life, the fluids abound over the solids, and the elements which go to expand the frame are received and appropriated very plentifully, while a much smaller amount is exhaled. The stage of maturity is that in which the balance is equal; and this period is supposed to include, at the outside, twenty years of human life. Then begins the process of dying, as the philosophers say; or, as less learned persons express it, we turn our faces towards old age ”

“ The physiology of old age is well understood—general sluggishness of all the functions, stiffness of the joints, more or less so-called rheumatism, loss of strength, wasting tissues, broken sleep, failing hearing and eyesight, capricious appetite, and so on. But the psychology of old age is not so easily described. The old man reasons well, the judgment is clear, the mind active, the conscience alert, the interest in life unabated. ”

“ Of sleep and waking we have already treated; about life and death we shall speak later on, and likewise about health and disease, in so far as it belongs to the science of nature to do so. But at present we have to investigate the causes of some creatures being long-lived, and others short-lived. ”

“ The latter is thus almost, although perhaps not quite, as primordial as the phase of growth itself, and among the most ancient and persistent of all the heritages that higher forms of life received251 from the lower is this power to grow young. Thus the systole and diastole of the heart of the Zoölogos began. The monad becomes a duad; the individual, a dividual, almost as inevitably as the former grows; and the processional through this tiny life cycle contains in it the promise and potency of countless other processes that developed from it later. ”

“ For the scientific aspects of the processes involved in life and its cessation see Biology, Physiology, Pathology, and allied articles; and for the consideration of the prolongation of life see Longevity. Here it is only necessary to deal with the more primitive views of death and with certain legal aspects. ”

“ It becomes evident, then, that as we ascend in the scale of Life we rise also in the scale of longevity. The lowest organisms are, as a rule, shortlived, and the rate of mortality diminishes more or less regularly as we ascend in the animal scale. ”

“ 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. ”

“ My own life work, such as it is, as a genetic psychologist was devoted for years to the study of infancy and childhood, then to the phenomena of youth, later to adulthood and the stage of sex maturity. To complete a long-cherished program I have now finally tried, aided by the first-hand knowledge that advancing years have brought, to understand better the two last and closing stages of human life. ”

“ Further, in a natural structure are longevity and a sound constitution coincident, or is shortness of life independent of unhealthiness? Perhaps in the case of certain maladies a diseased state of the body and shortness of life are interchangeable, while in the case of others ill-health is perfectly compatible with long life. ”

“ The average specific longevity, on the other hand, depends on a multitude of extrinsic conditions operating on the intrinsic constitution; these extrinsic conditions are given by the environment of the species as it affects the young and the adults, enemies, diseases, abundance of food, climatic conditions and so forth. ”

“ And the greater correspondence thus established, must, other things equal, show itself both in greater complexity of life, and greater length of life: a truth which will be fully perceived on remembering the enormous mortality which prevails among lowly-organized creatures, and the gradual increase of longevity and diminution of fertility which we meet with on ascending to creatures of higher and higher developments. ”

“ On the other hand, in an organism such as our own, crises like puberty or the menopause, in which the individual is completely transformed, are quite comparable to changes in the course of larval or embryonic life—yet they are part and parcel of the process of our ageing. ”

“ An early bloom is too apt to presage an early decay; and though our mortuary statistics, thanks to the advance of medical and sanitary science, do undoubtedly show that [Pg 79] the average duration of life is becoming more and more extended, and that the Golden Age, in this respect, is before us rather than in the past ”

“ They should endeavor to learn to live along a line of steady development; to keep themselves in the forefront of thought and endeavor; to repudiate old age as more a matter of want of will than of necessity—and so abjure a statement I have recently heard from a young physician—that the only disease for which there is no remedy is old age. There is a remedy in living en rapport with the subtle forces of growth. ”

“ I have said that there is involved in the mere length of life a larger and higher boon than is apparent without reflection. First, because length of life is in general a tolerably accurate measure of the amount of health, without a good share of which life is comparatively worthless. The instances are rare in which a person attains to old age who has not enjoyed at least a moderate share of daily health and vigour. ”

“ Apart from inherited illnesses, the wear and tear of life, end the worry that naturally attends the struggle for existence is very hard upon most of us, and if it were not for weekly periods of rest, the average span of our existence would be a much shorter one than it really is. ”

“ Recognizing the fact that the essential cells in our241 body are inherently capable under proper conditions of living indefinitely, the problem that confronts us is whether environment or heredity has most to do in determining the actual length of life. Pearl163 concludes that the death rate of the earliest period of life is selective, eliminating the weak and leaving the strong, and that inheritance is “one of the strongest elements, if not indeed the dominating factor, in determining the duration of life of human beings.” ”

“ When the improvements have been in existence for a longer period, so that the lives of all who are living must have been affected from birth by the changed conditions, we may infer that even a greater gain in the mean duration of life will be shown. ”

“ And the same holds true as to the health of the body, and the prolongation of life to an appointed period. He who dies must first have life; he who grows to manhood must arrive at it through the previous stages of youth, childhood and infancy. ”

“ Before me, no medical man knew the cause of old age. I have proved what the deterioration factor is, and I have provided a remedy—a sure and immediate remedy! The golden age of mankind is here! Our life span can be greatly extended!"
I looked at Jake Heinz, my cameraman. Jake winked at me, but I didn't respond. ”