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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    gation on a small scale, which were confirmatory of that view. Since then, many instances have been communi- cated to me by medical men which lead to the same conclusion. I there remarked that the statement must be quali- fied in a manner which savours rather of the paradoxical; namely, that wounds in old people heal quickly, provided they do not slough. That is to say, the apparently oppo- site tendencies exist at this time of life—namely, the tendency to slough and the tendency to heal quickly. Such, for instance, is the experience of oculists, whose testimony on the subject I have asked. They find that the cornea sometimes sloughs after the operation for cataract in old people; but that, when it does not slough, the wound heals quite as quickly as, or more quickly than, at an earlier time of life. So in other operations. The old person may sink, or the wound may slough or ulcerate; but, if these eventualities be escaped, a quick healing may be expected. Certainly this would not have been anticipated. We should not have thought, when the nutritive forces are generally failing, when strength and weight are diminish- ing, when repair is each year less and less able to keep pace with wear, as evinced, among other things, by the fact that exhaustion is more quickly induced and less quickly recovered from; when the brain is shrinking, and