Old age : its care and treatment in health and disease / by Robert Saundby.

Date:
1913
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Old age : its care and treatment in health and disease / by Robert Saundby. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

    32/328 (page 20)
    The case of Cornaro may be accepted without question as he was well known to his contemporaries, his tracts drew attention to his condition, and his long and healthy life was commonly regarded with wonder and admiration, although few were found to follow his precepts. Out of the fifty-two cases collected by Sir George Humphry in only eleven was the age confirmed by baptismal records, which illustrates the want of precise evidence which appears to satisfy the majority of persons who bring forward cases of this kind. In the seventy-third annual report of the Registrar- General (1910) there is a valuable table giving the deaths in England and Wales at each year of age from 0 to 100 and over. Of those who were registered as having attained a hundred years or more there were G5, of whom 22 were males and 43 females. It would be interesting if, whenever a medical man is called upon to give a certificate of death for a patient who is stated to be over a hundred years of age he would inquire into the evidence that exists of the age of the patient, and, further, if the Registrar-General would give the particulars in these cases where the claim is supported. The excess of female centenarians over male is not peculiar to this table, but only illustrates the general rule. Thus, in Sir George Humphry’s book, in which he quotes the Registrar-General’s report for 1873, of 89 persons dying at or over the age of a hundred only 10 were males, and he thought that women possessed inherently more vitality, instancing the fact of the greater mortality among male babies. In his cases 12 of the 52 investigated were the first children of their parents, a fact which so far as it goes is in opposition to the popular belief that first children have not such good constitutions