THE DANGEROUS AGE

Manawatu Times, Volume XLIX, Issue 2310, 1 December 1925, Page 11

THE DANGEROUS AGE

RISING DEATH RATE FOR MID-DLE-AGED PERSONS. American physicians and psychologists are investigating the problem of the rising death rate for middle-aged persons despite the great advance in medical science and hygiene and the lowering of the death rate early in life. Man is not living as long as he ought to live by from 10 to 25 years (writes the New York correspondent of the London Evening Standard). Professor Abraham Myerson, head of the department of neurology at Tuft College Medical School, Boston, and a physician of wide practice in nerve diseases, has listed four physical and twelve mental reasons for the inability of the middle-aged to withstand the strenuous life of pre-sent-day civilisation, all of them more or less preventable. Bad physical hygiene and excesses of diet, exertion, or infection are the physical reasons why the middle-aged surrender to death. The twelve mental reasons for death which modern civilisation ought to be able to overcome are: —

The strenuous life carried too far. Sudden business failure. Blocked aims and destruction of hope. Realisation that the span of life is but a speck of time. Too much sensuality. In single-minded people the defeat Of their one ambition. The ever-present sight of death at the end of the road. The. death of another especially a young person. Increased speed of work and play. The demands of family and one’s fellows for more and more luxuries. The cost of living. Ego injury, hurt conscience, a. kind of psychic shell-shock resulting from realisation of failure after lifelong faith in tho doctrine that anyone who strives can succeed. Dr Myerson says that when tho pleasure has gone from life, living, ceases to seem worth while. He calls the loss of the pleasure feeling “anhedonia,” and he asserts: —• “The symbols and causes of anheclonia and such deaths as come from it are those things which typify an American civilisation which hurries through everything too fast for real enjoyment, too fast for real culture. Tho idea of success has become pathological; hurry and worry leave no room for real satisfaction or enjoyment. Too much excitement burns out vigour.”