Old age; the results of information received respecting nearly nine hundred persons who had attained the age of eighty years : including seventy-four centenarians.

  • Humphry, George Murray, Sir, 1820-1896.
Date:
1889
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Old age; the results of information received respecting nearly nine hundred persons who had attained the age of eighty years : including seventy-four centenarians. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library at Columbia University and Columbia University Libraries/Information Services, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the the Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library at Columbia University and Columbia University.

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    arteries provide a proportionately feebler blood-current; and a lower digestive power and a lessened appetite provide a smaller supply of fuel to feed, not enough to choke, the slowing fires. Thus the capacity for action is diminishing, and the demand for it and the matei'ial for it are diminishing also; and all are diminishing in due ratio to one another. It may be said, indeed, that at all periods of life the healthy and well-working, and especially the enduring, quality of the body, depends upon a good adjustment, a good balance, of the several parts; and it is upon the well-ordered, proportionately or developmentally regulated, decline in the several organs, that the stages which succeed to maturity are safely passed, and that crown of physical glory—a healthy old age—is attained. A time comes at length when, in the course of the descending developmental processes, the several com- ponents of the machine, slowly and much, though equally, weakened, fail to answer to one another's call, which is also weakened, a time when the nervous, the circulatory, and the respiratory organs have not force enough to keep one another going; then the wheels stop rather than are stopped, and a developmental or physiological death terminates the developmental or physiological decay. The old man who had gone to bed, apparently much as usual, is found dead in the morning, as though life's engine had been unable to repair itself in sleep suffici-