YOUTH IN OLD AGE

New Zealand Times, Volume L, Issue 11664, 31 October 1923, Page 12

YOUTH IN OLD AGE

REJUVENATION DANCERS LONDON SURGEON’S WARNING. “Hidden dangers lie behind an operation for rejuvenating; a man. It is like putting a new engine in a brokendown motor-car.” This was the opinion of a leading London Burgeon who discussed the death of Mr Arthur Liardet, the London hotelkeeper, who underwent Dr Sergo Voronoff’s gland operation. Mr Liardet's period of rejuvenation lasted two years. “There is no doubt that Dr Voronoff’s treatment really rejuvenates a man,” said the surgeon. “The public should r.ot forget, however, that if a man is rejuvenated between the ages of fifty and seventy years, his body, and especially his heart and lungs, is not sufficiently strong to stand the strain which is imposed on it by his new activities.

' “He may play football and cricket like a man of twenty-one years, and his biceps may be like those of a prizefighter, but his body haß been working for fifty or sixty years. The new impetus will be too much for the framework, and the body will break up like firewood.

“There is a danger that all rejuvenation experiments may do more harm than good. It is noticeable that patients who have undergone such treatment live a few months of glorious youth again and then die. Two years is tho longest they rail reasonably export to live after tile operation.

“A man who saerificos the last years of hi* life for a few men tbs of youth is like Faust selling himself to the devil.”