DANCING AT 73.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXIII, Issue 19376, 10 July 1926, Page 2 (Supplement)

DANCING AT 73.

FAMOUS DOCTOR'S CAREER. SIR JAMES CANTLIE'S DEATH. •Sir.' James Oantlie, the eminent Harley Street »specialist, arid one of the greatest authorities on tropical diseases, died in a London "nursing home recently. He was 75 years of age. He was taken ill while in Scotland last September, and was removed under medical supervision to his hotne in London. , Few men have lived a life of more varied activity or worked harder than Sir James Cantlie. He became a surgeon at • the age of t 26,. and was demonstrator in Anatomy at Charing Cross Hospital for 15 years. He visited Egypt with the Cholera Expedition of 1883, and subsequently spent nine years in China, where he was Dean of the College of Medicine until 1896. , Sir James was an enthusiastic .exponent of physical exercises as a means of keeping fit. " Old age is just a pose, and a man is a§. old as his' arteries," he declared on one occasion, shortly before bo began to conduct " physical jerks" classes in London for men and women past middle age. The veteran instructor not only gave the orders bui, took part in the exercises. . " At 73," Sir James once, said in a le<> ture, "I can dance as well as I could at 17." He shared with Edison the belief that we sleep too much. He slept four hours a day and found it sufficient. " I rise at four o'clock every morning," he said, " except when I rise at two. Lying in bed is a waste of time.. There ai'e four social poisons," he said in an address—"tea, coffee, alcohol, and tobacco, and of these tobacco is the least injurious." He declared that a man could smoke hard and live to a hundred. Sir James, when in China, formed a friendship with Dr. Sun Yat Sen, who became the first President of Southern China. He was instrumental in securing Sun Yat Sen's release when he was kidnapped and imprisoned by his countrymen in the Chinese Legation in London.