WHEN MEN ARE AT THEIR BEST

Dominion, Volume 31, Issue 154, 26 March 1938, Page 8 (Supplement)

WHEN MEN ARE AT THEIR BEST

Between 35 And 40 Years

At what period of their lives do the great poets, inventors, scientists make their finest contributions? In their early manhood, most of us will agree. Though we argue from impressionistic judgments, illustrative cases and, if we are really studious and just' a little critical, from averages, we happen to be right. But how far right? Professor Harvey C. Lehman, of Ohio University’s Department of Psychology, who specialises in creative years, so to speak, and has determined those of astronomers, writers, btfteball players (if baseball playing can be called creative), artists and leaders iu social progress, goes about this business more methodically and applies life insurance methods. Ask him an'd he will tell you that curves must be prepared (statistical distributions, if you must be mathematical). For only these reveal trends and thus make it possible to form sound judgments. The latest of these studies deals with the creative years in medicine, surgery and relate'd fields. After an immense amount of dredging in the available literature Dr. Lehman brought up 41 bacteriologists, 54 physiologists,, 40 contributors to our knowledge of goitre, 170 pathologists, 70 anatomists, 150 medical discoverers

and inventors, 73 surgeons, 44 discoverers of drugs and remedies, an'd 537 physicians who had made important advances in medicine and public hygiene. He plotted curves for all in five-year intervals. Allowing, as they do, for the fact that more contributors to any art or science are alive at the younger than at the older age levels, the curves leave doubt that leaders in medicine, surgery and the related sciences follow the rule that applies to the rest of creative humanity. The peak of productivity occurs between the ages of 35 and 40. The conclusion must not be drawn from Dr. Lehman’s studies that men over 40 paint no great pictures, write no-great poems, make no great contributions to science. Titian was painting a masterpiece when he was carried off by the plague at the age of 99. Some of the medical worthies who played their unwitting part in making Dr. Lehman’s curves what they are were doing fine work long after thev were 70. The curves apply to groups and not to individual great men. No curve can show that Voltaire at 80 was the intellectual match of any younger contemporaneous wit in Europe, or that Euripides at 70 was the foremost dramatist of his time.