The Health at Sixty.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XXIX, Issue VIII, 23 August 1902, Page 509

The Health at Sixty.

Rules of hygiene and dietetics applicable in health may be exceptioned by structural and functional disorders. This brief article is for the man and woman of sixty in whom no grave departure from health is made evident. I select this, age because it is, under the unwholesome environment of modern civilisation, the very border line of decaying vitality. They who Wend to adipose have became shapeless. They who lose flesh have reached a condition of emaciation. It is the time of bald heads, and dehumanised figures; the time when the revelation of the mirror is accepted, and progressive impairment is regarded as inevitable.

How to retain the vigour of youth, and how to regain it when lost, are problems that have in every century of historic time enthralled the world’s best minds. Working with the few poor facts of an undeveloped chemistry, and with the plenteous fictions of that rank growth, “occultism,” men have given up the reality in seeking the shadow, the elixir of youth.

Yet have these labours not been in vain, for by them facts have evolved from facts, giving birth in the ultimate to that wide circle of sciences dealing with all the laws of man’s physical being, and conveniently, but erroneously, generalised as “medical.” Now we have attr ined to the cer-

tainty that such an eiixir of youth is impossible. We have learnt that man’s decay is governed by such complex laws that no one force or chent’eal compound could arrest it.

Although the problem once before the mediaeval dreamer has shown itself many times more difficult than he deemed it to be, this revelatioi. of complexity’ has brought the desired end within a reach measurable if distant. We no longer seek one thing, but many things. We seek the best ways of acting on each bodily func-

tion, that by ensuring its perfection we may- secure the perfection of that totality of functions termed physical life.

Were this subject to be considered exhaustively I should have to pen a substantial volume. But those who feel interested in the study may be assisted in collating facts by the following summary of the conditions to be sought:

Functional activity' of the heart, liver, kidneys, spleen, intestines, and other parts essential to vitality: elasticity of the arteries; undilated character of the veins; perviousness of the capillaries; suppleness of the joints; reduction of undim stoutness;

increase of flesh, when .here is attenuation; development and maintenance of muscular strength; compactness of figure; firmness of facial contour; removal of wrinkles; promotion of hair growth ami colour; retention of mental vigour, ami the vigour of the physical senses.