HOW TO LIVE TO BE 100.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 19199, 16 June 1924, Page 10

HOW TO LIVE TO BE 100.

By a Hurley Street Doctor, in the Weekly Dispatch.

There is an old saying that unhappy marriages last for ever. Certain it is that if a man and his wife have quarrelled a good deal they seldom survive one another very long. The interest somehow goes out of life when there is no one left to quarrel with. When I learned that the year 1920 had been the healthiest ever known in the history of the world I could not help remembering this fact. If or last year was one of the most anxious and difficult this country lias experienced. Jn other words, our troubles have been a tonic to us. We arc discovering, as a nation, the wonderful effect of hard times in hardening and stimulating the human powers of resistance. It is a discovery almost as old as the world itself. Every great soldier and leader of men has made it. Every statesman is, or ought to be, aware of iL —Keep Your Punch.— Put people in easy circumstances, and sooner or later they grow* “ soft ” ; send them out to face the worries and anxieties of life and they grow strong again. Behind that truth lies, to-day, a new system of treating disease. Slowly but surely doctors are coming to see that health is only another name for the power to strike hack when one is struck. A sick man is a man w r ho cannot strike back—who cannot “ react.” And therefore the secret of long life is the secret of hard hitting, whether in a mental or a bodily sense. Keep your “ punch ” and you can defy the years. Let me give you an example; If a man receives a shock, the first effect .of that shock is to make his heart beat more slowly. If the shock is very great his heart may even pause for'a moment. But if he is healthy, within a few seconds his heart will be beating hard, and his pale face will be red with blood. The shock, in other words, has “ bucked him up.” It has made him stronger by making him—in the first place—weaker. The same shock, however, would make a sick man faint away. He would not be able to “hit back.” During the war some heart specialists learned this lesson. They actually treated soldiers with wealc hearts by giving them exercises. At first they were very nervous about, doing this, and used to watch the men carefully the whole lime the exercises were being carried on. But after a while that fear passed away. The effect of the treatment showed that it was absolutely correct. Day by day and little by little the weak hearts grew stronger. They were “hardened,” so to speak, and got back their healthy “ punch.” Exactly the same thing applies to the stomach People, who become the slaves of their digestions and live on milk diets never get well. I know’ of a most remarkable case of that sort. When I met him first he was a feeble-looking young man who believed that both his heart and his stomach were permanently out of order. He visited manv doctors and lived on many different kinds of “diets.” The least alarm turned him pale. —Facing the Rough and Tumble.— Then the war came, and the young man was called up. Fortunately for him a very sensible medical board passed him as fit for training. He was filled with anxiety, and appealed against their decision, which he thought was as good as a sentence of death. But in spite of that he had to serve. What is more, he had to ©at the same food as his comrades were eating. I met him after the armistice, and did not know who he was. Ho asked me out to dinner, and we had — well, 1 hesitate to say what we didn t have. When it was all over be asked mo how I thought lie was looking. “ You are looking as if you might live to 100,” I said. “ And I mean to live to 100.” From a flat-chested, weedy youth without fibre of any kind, he had developed into a sturdy, broad-shouldered man every moment of whose life was a joy to him. I asked him hpw he had done it, and he told me that he had not done it at all. “ What saved me,'’ lie said. “ was being forced to face the rough and tumble of life. Exercise cured my heart and bully beef mended my stomach.” I am not suggesting, of course, that there are not times when rest is necessary or diets beneficial. But the modern "tendency is to overdo these things. The real medicines of the world are its strenuous games, its hard work, and its troubles. It is profoundly true that people with great responsibilities have no time to be ill. They have “no time,” as a merry old doctor of my acquaintance puts it, “to He down and die.” Each of us can go into training for a long life by making his or her own life strenuous and eager. That is the first step. The second step consists in seeing that our bodies have a few good hard knocks every day—so that they may not fail in the power to hit back. A cold bath is a “ knock ” of that sort. The glow which follows it represents the body’s response. So, again, is a brisk walk before breakfast, so is an open ( vrindow on a cold night, so is the use of dumb-bells or clubs in one’s The wearing of a belt is another form of the same treatment. The wearer is forced to breathe with his chest, and thus develops lung power. —Joy of Being Fit.— It is an interesting fact that every army in the world puts a belt round the soldier’s waist as soon as he joins up. People who prefer what they call comfort to length of days always forget that it is immensely comfortable to be fit. They forget, too, that a body which hits back quickly gives its owner, as a rule, no trouble. He can trust it to see him through almost any difficulty. That is why the wave of depression which followed the war—when we all got homo again and grew soft—is passing away now. The hard tunes of the last two years have put ns back to training. As a nation we are wonderfully fit—and so w’onderfully cheerful. We shall probably live longer than our fathers for just that reason.