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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    scope was thus afforded for the carrying out of those descending or senile developmental processes which must have been nearly dormant in the earlier periods of human existence. It was not to be expected that this good seed should be without a blending with tares; and the scope thus given for the fuller development of the physiological processes gave scope also for the development of the pathological processes, and enabled the various diseases to spring up and take their course, afflicting not man only, but those animals also which come under his fostering or protecting influence. • It may therefore be said that the prolongation of life into and through the periods of decay, and into and through the processes of disease—indeed almost, if not quite, the very existence of decay and disease—are the result of human forethought and sympathy. In other words, decay and disease are, by civilisation, substituted for quick and early death. Without attempting to balance the pros and cons of this, we know it to be a position from which there is not, and ought not to be, any disposition to recede; and if there were the wish, there is not the possibility. The onward march of civil- isation is a necessity, and the onward progress of disease will tend to go with it. But it does remain for fore- thought and sympathy to narrow the range of the evils