HEARTS BROKEN BY HUSTLE

Otago Daily Times, Issue 18465, 28 January 1922, Page 15

HEARTS BROKEN BY HUSTLE

TOLL OF HIGH-SPEED LIVING.

“EFFICIENCY” DEATHS. High-speed living is killing men and women by heart disease at the rate cf thousands a year. Motoring, telephones, all the paraphernalia incidental to the bustle of modern existence are exacting a terrible toll on the Jives of the men and women of the nation, 'While deaths in Great Britain from diseases of the heart and circulatory system amounted to 50,492 in 1896, the number hod leaped in 1919 to 69,637, of which no fewer than 51,550 were due to organic diseases alone. A comparison of the number of outpatients at the National Hospital for Diseases of the Heart for 1914 and last year shows: i 1914 ... - - ... - 1920 Increase 23,000 A proportion of this astounding increase is composed of ex-service men whose hearts were affected by the strain of war, but the secretary of the hospital said that the “normal” growth in heart disease during recent years had been of grave dimensions. “Speeding up,'' he said, “has been largely responsible for it.” All the medical evidence confirms this view. The “do-it-at-a-jump” habits, largely imported from America, are ruining British hearts. The mania for speed is killing more by diseAo than it is by accident. _ ''Efficiency” that depends wholly or mainly on rapidity is being bought at the price of disease and death. Motoring is a case in point. There is always the sense of< strain, the “keyed-up” feeling that anticipates misadventure, great or small, and braces the whole system to meet it. The sense of strain is often only subconscious. It is perhaps only when the driver or the passenger reaches the journey’s end that relaxation brings the fatigue caused not by effort but by strain, the full force of which has been homo by the heart. Sooner or later the heart must do affected as is the mechanism of tho car itself. Stress and strain are brealdng more hearts than love, and they are brought about by tho modern cjraza for living and working at top speed.