THE . OREGON ; SUNDAY . JOURNAL, PORTLAND, SUNDAY . MORNING, FEBRUARY 28, 1915. 7 DEATH LONGEVITY FALLACIES EXPOSED While Human Power Cannot Determine the Death Rate, Much Can Be Done to Pro long Life. MYTHS ABOUT ANIMALS' AGES ARE LAID BARE Theories Relative to Exces sive Years Lived by Crea tures in Animal Realm Ex ploded by Science, GOOD OLD DAYS SCOUTED CONDITIONS ARE BETTER These Have Been Effected in . Reduction of Infant Mor tality Generally. Article No. 2. 'HE old cynic philosophers averred that nothing was sure but death and taxes. But with . the death rate cut down 60 pei t cent within 50 years and single taxers declaring war to the death on , all taxes save one and even that possibly to be abolished when we can control our natural re sources it looks as If the saying wai In need of revision. Even though there be "a Divinity that shapes our ends, rough hew them as we will,' it is evi dent that our skill with the hatchet la Improving rapidly. Tn the sense that we must all die some - day, which is a consolation rather than otherwise, toy the happiest life, like the greatest battle, gets to he a bore sooner or later and begins to run around in circles, death is still sure. But .as to the time, the method and every -other detail of our final . taking leave of the world, we are almost absolutely trc agents, and the sky .is the only limit. To paraphrase Scripture: "The dirty and unventllat ed man shall not live out half his days." And even what the span of those days, the so-called natural dura tion of life, may be is still quite un sure, and, for all that we can see, -unlimited. Nearly 60 years ago, in the very dawn of sanitary science, Chad- wick, the Croat English health pioneer, declared that he was prepared to plan and build a city which should have any desired death rate, from 5 per 1000 per annum up! He was simply laughed at by both the pious and the practical men of - those days, but within little more than half a century a lineal descendant of his In science, one William C. Gorgas, fulfilled his prophecy almost to the letter by building just such a city, a whole country, in fact, and that not in the bracing," healthful north, but in . the seething tropics. For two different semi-annual periods the death rate of , the white employes in Panama, includ ing nearly a third of women and chil dren? touched 6 per 1000 per annum. And General Gorgas could work at least two thirds of the same miracle all over these United States if he were appointed secretary to a great national department of health and public safety and given a free hand as to pure water, good food, airy, tun-lit houses, war on infections, and last, but by no means least, good wages. It is very signifi cant that the lowest northern white wage rate paid in Panama, the first and only "spotless town" in history, was 15 a day, and the lowest colored or tropical white rate 3 a day. more than double what they had been ac customed to at home. Am Apparent Xaradox That Tails, a Big Truth, Hers, as everywhere, the apparent paradox holds: Double the wages and you halve the death rate and treble the net efficiency. Indeed, when Gorgas was asked what should be the first step to lower the death rate in a north ern factory town, ho replied: "A mini mum wage of $S!" "But," says some one at once, "we all must die sometime of something. Supposing that we can save 1000 lives from poisoned milk In infancy, from the Uttle pestilences' in childhood, or tuberculosis and typhoid in youth-, aren't we simply shifting the deaths from one part of the Ufa scale to another, postponing the day of ac count, but altering the final balance - and settlement not a whit?" Does not our boasted Increased average length of life consist mainly of a huge sav ing of Uvea In infancy, childhood ana early youth, by coddling and hot hous ing and - promoting the survival of those who would otherwise have died at those periods until they can be no longer kept going and break down and die in spite Of us at .40. 45 or 60? This is apparently supported by the curious fact that, while our death rate for all earlier ages of life has gone down tre mendously, that from 48 to 60 has not only not diminished, but even in creased slightly,, about 5 per cent in males and i per cent In females. This straw is eagerly clutched at by our life insurance companies to explain the "fact that they are still insuring lives in the-twentieth century with a death rate of 15 per 1000 at rates fixed in tjhe nineteenth when the death rate was over 30. ' At the first sight, this pessimistic contention seems plausible and has been used as the basis for bitter attacks-upon our modern methods of sanitation and social betterment. But, as a matter of fact, it has as tonishingly little support or standing in court when the actual facts are studied. First of all, it rests upon the purely gratuitous assumption that there is a fixed and definite limit to the healthiest and soundest hu man life, beyond which it is im possible to extend our span upon this planet. This, like most uni versally accepted assumptions, is based upon little more than legend and tradition, and the experience that tn the old, unhappy days, before the dawn of the scientific era, barely two-thirds of a century ago, the days of Ignorance and filth, of cowardice and cruelty, of poverty and piety, which we fatuously refer to as "the good old days," most human beings who - worried through the famines and ; pestilences, and the- private stabblngs. and the public slaughter ings, the offal they were glad to get for food and the sewage for water, - were at the end of three score or three score and ten years, pretty well worn out and ready . to drop Into the chimney comer and prate about "Vanitas vanitatum!" Their bodies had endured more in sults, attacks and hairbreadth es capes " tn a month - than ours do in . a year. And it is the things that have happened to us that make us old, not the mere length of time we have been upon the planet. -. But even if we accept the- mournful wailing dirge: "The days of our years are threescore-years and ten, and if by rea son of strength they be four-score. - - , ; . : . , v,. yet Is their strength labor and trou ble, for it is soon cut off and we fly away," as our war song, we have plenty of leeway before we bump against the inevitable. If every body lived to be 70, that would rough ly mean a' death rate of about 12 per 1000 a year in a -stationary com munity. But, as most modern com munities are not stationary, in fact are increasing at the rate of 2 to 5 per cent per annum, this means an actual possible death rate of ' about six or seven per 1000. And the best we have ever won yet for a whole country or large city is from 13 to 15. So we still have a long and cheerful way to Tipperary befor we reach the imaginary limit. But isOit most singular how the more clofcely we study the question of the so-called "natural term" of life the more impossible it becomes to find any positive proof of such a thing. Some very interesting and careful studies of the natural life times of animals have recently been made by eminent biologists and sta tlstlcians, notably Professor. Chalmers Mitchell, director of the famous Lon don Zologtcal Society's gardens. The investigations covered a large num ber of species, wild, in captivity and domestic, with the singular and un expected result that it appeared im possible to fix any definite limit at which life under anything ap proaching ideal circumstances must come to an end. Certainly nine tenths of either wild or domestic animals were found to die under half their maximum age from causes which might be termed accidental, 1. e., which had nothing to do with the essential exhaustion of their vital powers. In not a 'few species, such as some fresh water fishes which could be accurately observed in ponds for considerable periods, not merely life, but also growth appeared to continue indefinitely until terminated by capture, drought or disease. The famous "monster," wary old trout, in the deep hole under the tree roots, or the wise old pike, the despair and the delight of the angler, is ap parently only an illustration of what many "little fishes in the brook" might attain to if possessed of ade quate intelligence, wariness and cour age. It is even difficult to fix within 60 per cent of what might be called an average natural term of life for most animals, Including such familiar boarders as dogs, cats and horses. It was found that the lifetime of a dog or a horse was, up to 20 years for the latter and 10 or 12 for the former, pretty much what we chose to make It by our skill or our ignorance, our care or our neglect, and well attested cases are on record of nearly double these equine and canine ages being at tained. This almost perfectly corre sponds with the results of our study and experience with the genus human um, for the more carefully we look into the actual facts of the case under the microscope, in the test tube and on the post mortem table, the more over whelmingly are we driven to the con clusion that the so-called signs of old age are the clear marks of either mal nutrition, overwork or of Infectious diseases which we were supposed to have recovered from. It would seem only reasonable that there should be such a thing as the decay at our body and its various organs, simply through the cumulative effects of suc cessive decades of wear and tear. But so far as clear and distinguishing marks of senile decay' In our Internal organs is concerned, almost every one of them shows the unmistakable hand writing and footprints of some form of infectious disease. Old Age Xardry Brer a Cause of Ssath That famous decay and hardening of the arteries, for instance whose pompous Greco-Latin name, arterio sclerosis, has been dignified into a new disease of civilisation, is now clearly traceable in the great majority of cases to one or another of the infec tions, or fevers, after the normal re sistance of the body has been lowered by prolonged muscular overstrain, bad food and bad air. Even more con trary to popular impression, death by old age is and always has been one of the-rarest of exits from this world's stage. Two decades or more ago Plexner discovered that the great ma jority of deaths occurring In hos pitals, even In those who had been crippled in their joints, or heart, or kidneys, or liver, or nervous system, and were In a state of serious chronic disease, were due not actually to that chronic disease itself, but to a sudden and vicious attack of what would un-; der other circumstances have been a trivial infection, like a cold in the head, an. influenza, a tonsilitis, or a mild bronchitis or pneumonia. So un iformly was this the case that he coined the phrase "terminal infections" to describe these last germs "straws which broke the camel's back" of vital resistance. So widely has the idea extended since that most of our boards of health or ' census bureaus refuse to accept "old age" as an adequate and Intelligible cause of death in a death certificate. Although we may perhaps be in clined to resent this as. pure hair split ting; with a vague sort of feeling that any man who lives to be 75 or over Is entitled to fle of anything be pleases and no questions asked, yet it Is an interesting and consoling thought, with applications of considerable prac tical value, that so. far there Is scarce ly a single attested case on record of any human being actually dying, sim ply, in the classic phrase, "because he couldn't live any longer," upon pure ly internal grounds. Most deaths from "old age" are due to pneumonia, of a mercifully painless and swift type, sel dom running "more than four days and often only , two. We may . even feel some little sympathy with the . man giving -his family "history in making application for. life-insurance, who, when asked , what . his maternal grand father, aged 85, died of, replied after some minutes of cogitation: "Well, I really couldn't say positively, but I know it wasn't anything serious!" It is certainly significant and hopeful that, so far as the actual facts go, the full, natural, unstarved, uninfect ed, unsweated possible limit of human life has probably never yet been reached. It leaves all sorts of possi bilities open to us in the future. On the other hand, studies upon the lower animals have swept into the limbo of legend and tradition, where they be long, a great deal of "skimble-skamble" stuff about the superior longevity of animals as contrasted with man. All the animal centenarians, for in stance, have gone into' the waste paper basket, like their alleged human con freres. No basis whatever was found to exist for the huge longevities claimed for the raven, or the tnrtle. or the elephant, or any of the othran imal Methuselah3, except the very rich and abundant one of our utter and complete ignorance of the actual date of their birth. For instance, in the elephant, practically all tame elephants are born wild and captured after ma turity. Longevity of A:&als a Popular Myth. Of the . few born in captivity none has ever reached the age of 50. Most of them show all the signs of old age at 35 or 40. The royal elephant that had carried five generations of rajahs or kings was found to be a myth, or else the knife or the poison bowl had been very busy among the rajahs. Our utter lack of knowledge about the rate of growth of the tortoise and of the turtle, and the ease with which the guileful practical joker can carve on the shell of the torpid and helpless beast any name and date he chooses, from "Adam, Year 1" up, leaving it to be discovered next season with open eyed wonder by the parlor naturalist. As art amusing illustration, a huge tortoise weighing nearly 300 pounds was brought to the New York zoo from the Galapunos islands; it was alleged to be over 200 years old, and to grow about an inch in diameter a year. For several months it hibernated, but woke up In the spring, began to grow, and in three months gained over 30 per cent in sixe and weight. It was prob ably between a and 7 years old. This forms the basis of -the huge longevi ties attributed to. these beasts. In the case of the raven, it is sim ply a case of "All coons look alike to roe," for the single pair of ravens that had built their nest continuously for 125 years in one turret of the old castle may have comprised anywhere from 10 to 50 different generations, for anything that any human observer could tell to the contrary. The same utter lack of accurate knowledge ex plains the extraordinary longevity as cribed to the eaerle, the lion, the wild swan and the boa constrictor. There Is absolutely no trustworthy record of any elephant over 50, or any raven over 20, nor of. any tortoise over 30 years old; and the oldest fish, flesh or fowl ever positively known In cap tivity was a parrot which attained the age of 33 in the bird house at the London soo. With apologies to Poe: We are driven to agreeing That no living human being Ever yet was blessed with seeing Bird or beast that reached three-score, so that all the talk about animals taking a certain time to reach matur ity, as evidenced by the condition of their teeth or the union of the heads of their bones with their- shafts, or their first mating period, and then llvi ing so many multiples of that time, with the enchanting conclusion that human beings, upon this principle, ought to reach at least 150 to 200 years, must go by the board completely. We come as near to living our full nat ural span of life as any known animal. In fact, the conditions under which we live are as "natural" and healthful as those that surround any animal; and we have not the slightest reason to regard ourselves as inferior in either health, vigor or longevity to any of our animal cousins or bird relatives. Let us see for a moment what the RED CROSS AMBULANCE BOUGHT BY COLLEGE STUDENTS V: ; ,i - X r-f "'-y-y- - y - 4vi r.s.s. - y - y- y- X'PN Ty 53 i ; ! mmshl, Wk-- - - iS a pC fy ' " . -iwc 3- ijfir'hle fxii' K: a V&iCv' , - - , ,. $, :': ' ' :. To of the new Red Cross ambulances bought by funds raised by the students at Harvard and Yale, soon to "be sent to Europe for usa .wbere most needed. -.Yale aea raised funds-to--buy22-machines;. Harvard men. 5. , Y: . ' y y '.. '' -t " -' ' K " '"-y '. - ' ' "' ' - - - . . - ' i jr .'LVSf:if ',v .SAj-v-cyi m - ssss-r : Dr. Woods Hutchinson A. M., big. massive figures in the death lists are at the different periods of life, and how far they come within our own control. In Infancy, the message of the scroll is so vividly clear that he who runs may read it. We used to have, in the prc-bacterial days., a death rate during the first year of life of anywhere from 250 to 350 per thousand born. In the words of Hood's jingle: "What different lots our birthdays bring, For instance, one little mannikin thing Survives to bear many a wrinkle, "While death forbids another to wake; And a son that it took nine moons to make. Expires without a twinkle. " Our destinies happy or fatal. One little craft is cast away On its very first trip In Babbacombe bay; While another rides safe at Port Natal." Within 10 years of the time we had abandoned "The-Lord-gave,-the-Lord-hath-taken-away" attitude, we found that a third of this slaughter of the innocents was due to bad air and re spiratory diseases; another third to dirty milk, and we impiously proceed ed to thwart the "dispensations of Providence," with the result that in less than 40 years our infant death tate has been cut down Just about this clearly preventable two thirds; and a community which loses more than 10 infants -In the 100 during their first year considers itself more or less dis &c jw- Former Portland Physician graced. And really civilized commu nities like New Zealand and some of the Swiss Communes, where they stand for. those ridiculous things called "children's rights" to food, fresh air, play and love save all but seven, and even five in the hundred, of their babies. We are finding that even though the "son that expires without a twinkle" has its cause in the "sins of the fathers" and a very important one, whose removal will be attended by far reaching improve ments in many other departments of human life and happiness. But. challenges some heavy taxpay er and real estate owners, the real er and real estate owner (the real Circe that turns men into swine is not wo man, the enchantress, but the posses sion of and by too many acres of dirt). "Suppose you tide these weakly and ailing babes over into their second year, won't you simply spread' the mortality over the next five years as they slip their anchors one after an other, after costing the community just that much more for every year they survived?" Snow Infant Mortality Oat in Half. Let the figures answer. We only got the mortality cut in two about five or 10 years ago, but long enough for it to make its damaging effects visible upon the vitality of the children of the next five years, and the damning re sults are beginnings to show them selves already. Instead of rising tre mendously on account of the unfit and undesirable' infant lives loaded onto it. - ' I) 1 ( t--. u -. i sir " y " v-- ,f f s and President-Elect of The American Academy of Medicine. the mortality of the next period of life, up to the fifth year, has gone steadily down and down, until its re duction is almost as .great as that for the period of infancy. Passing on up through the seven ages of man, the next period, that of childhood proper, from the fifth to the fifteenth year, shows an almost equally marked sav ing of,, life, partly on account of the good work coming in to our aid, which has been done against those fnodern Herods, the diseases of childhood scarlet feverj diphtheria, whooping cough, measles, etc, and partly because the children with whom we have -to work are bigger, stronger and with better resisting power against disease, on account of. the good care that has been taken of them in Infancy. The tide of victory over the flood of short cotfins sweeps steadily on into the next period, that of young adult life, from 15 to 25, for here' our fight against tuberculosis, pneumoniae and typhoid comes to our aid. and clear through the next period, that of man hood and womanhood, 25 to 45. The "Captain of the Men of Death" are beaten backward at every point, al though the. victory is not quite so com plete here as it was in infancy.' It in only when we reach the climax, and the beginning decline of life that our lives begin to waver and the enemy plucks up courage to try to hold his own. But even this counts for noth ing until about the fiftieth year, after which, as our insurance experts so loudly trumpet on every occasion, the I'botOKraiib br Harrln II Ewlng. death rate remains the same as it did 40 years ago. . Indeed, in the period between 65 and 65 It falls about 6 per cent below the former average. This temporary check is usually attributed to the so called stresses 'and strains of civilization; over feeding, dissipa tion, hurry and excitement; and the diseases which principally cause this death rate of middle age, Brlght's dis ease, cancer, heart disease, paralysis and other degenerations of the nerv ous system, fibroses of the liver and hardening of the arteries (arterio rclerogis) have been dubbed the "dis eases of civilisation." The moment, however, that these diseases of middle life began to be in vestigated, it was found that they had no connection whatever with eat ing, drinking, high living or the pres sure of city life. On the contrary, nearly two thirds of them were clear ly traceable to damages left upon the heart, arteries, kidneys, liver and I nervous system oy xne nine lniet tions of childhood, the greater infec tions of middle life, typhoid, tuber culosis, syphilis and rheumatism, and even such trivial annoyances as cold in the head, sore throats and summer sicknesses. In other' words, the rea son why the death rate after 50 is not yet declining is that our work in sav ing babies and in lowering infant and child mortality was not fairly under way until about 26 years ago. In other words, after our present crop of 60-year-oiders had reached young adult life. We men and women of middle age are the hangovers from the pre hygienic period; and the young people who are coming up to take our places will probably not show a third of the so called diseases of middle life that we do, because they were protected during their Infancy, childhood and young adult life from the principal causes of these chronic degenerations. The intelligent care and protection row giv3n to the teeth alone t-111 add 10 or 15 year ..to cur life, to say noth ing of the discovery that abscesses In the gum and' about the roots of the teeth are one of the chief causes of chron!c" Rheumatism, - particularly of the most painful and crippling varie ties, anil that dirty mouths cause a large share of our anemias, our dys pepsias and our neuralgias. Twenty years more and toothaches will be a curiosity and plates and dentures, and artificial teeth almost unknown. The youngsters now coming up will keep their teeth till they are SO, and their digestion and elastic gait in propor tion. What would not we semi-centenarians have been spared in the shape of choked nostrils, irregular: teeth, per forated ear drums, broken mouths and pigeon breasts If only the magic word "adenoids' Lad been known and acted ipon le our childhood days? The crip ples of our generation are nearly all dead ind our new ones are coming up to take -their place; , children's hos pitals ; cure them all now; the blind asylums are emptying fast, and ten anted chiefly by old or middle a god victims. ' Thanks to spectacles and artificial teeth, old age is, relieved of half its dreariness and boredem. Woman Snows Ho Increase 1m Ssath Bat. I may mention in passing that woman his again shown her custo mary superior vitality and vigor, and Popular Practice, of Referring to Glad Times of, Day. ; Gone Causes Mirth; ; - that her death rate at these ages so deadly to men shows practically no in crease, and n distinctly superior de cline at all other periods of life. That this comparatively heavy , mortalltv during the periods from the fiftieth to the sixty-fifth year 1s due to a specific : cause of this sort Is supported by the cheering fact that after the alxty flfth year the death rata again begins to decline, as compared with that of the same age 40 years ago, while the percentage who pass 75 is larger, than it ever mas before. ' So that we nre in a position now to laugh at those loud and gloomy pre dictions about what would happen on account of our short sighted methods of saving Infant life, "promoting the survival of the unfit, and ; lowering the general average vitality of the race. The children of today of 'all ; ages from the fifth year on are from ; one to three Inches taller, six. to 29 pounds heavier and have from "three-; fourths to two Inches better chest de velopment than the children of cor. lespondlng ages 30 years ago. And, what Is practically the same ' thing, our American children of today have the seme superiority over the children today of the particular European country in which their fathtfs, grand--, fathers or great-grandfathers wera born. How much further this reduc tion of the death rate , can be carried along through the declining years ef, life is a question, but it is one which need not concern us much, if ws eau live a full, active, useful life up to 65. 70 or 76 years of age, what happens to us after that need. distress us ItttH'. To live hard and usefully, and die suddenly as possible, are the ideals vt biological philosophy. There ls'inelthr merit, nor credit, nor comfort, in out living our usefulness and our happi-. ness. .; : xriaety Tsars About the limit ofBu. . man &lf s. . . While me are utterly unable to say that there is any fixed limit to the duration of human life, the probabili ties are that even under the most ideil conditions which can be furnished by science the vast majority of us will fall by the wayside nefore our eighty-; fifth or ninetieth year, and most of us will not only be willing, but glad to do so. There are just ss many old people Jn the world as there ever were in proportion to the population. The Ide that old age was more frequently at tained in earlier ages is merely one of the many delusions connected with "the good old, days." All the people we have known who belonged to those earlier days were naturally- very old,; therefore ' that was the characteristic of the whole generation. They hel.1 . the same delusions shout their grand parents; our grandchildren will hold it about us. ' So far as we know, there are Just as many centenarians as ever, for the good and sufficient reason that thert Is not a single legally authenticated case of any human being having passed his hundred and first year in all his tory, eltler ancient or modern, as has been proved by careful snd exhaustive investigations by competent sciential and statisticians, Sir George Cornwall, Berry and others. No one need have the slightest ambition to become a ' centenarian, for of the thousands of those who are alleged to have reached their hundred and , first year,, only three ; names would ivar have ' been heard of save for the fact of their mere turtle-like persistence of life. It is probable thr.t the next third of a centnry will see as large a proportion of the human race reaching the age of. say, 63 or 65 as now survives the first 10 yearj of. life; ard as that will mean that we haejdon4 our work, lived our liyjesj started the next generation on its Way to success, and had an hon ored and comfortable decade or two In which to counsel the rising generation and see the results of our work and Tnuse- over what it was all about, we shall be as ready for our last sleep ss we are now for our pillow after a hard . day's work. Vast Snadsy, . Article STo. 2. Why we get no messages from the other world, . A - world. Spain enjoys . more sunshine than any other country in the' world. Had Lung Trouble . and Expected to Die The many recoveries brought about by Kckman's Alterative are attract-' Ing wide attention. Read about this case;- . - i ' ' 33 B UU Keyser, Wa. Ta, "Oentlemen i X was taken, sick 'U Vovember, isoe. X grew steadily worse. - Had two consultations. The verdict was the fever ha-A affected my . lungs and that my ease was hopeless ; only gave mo two montas to uve. My physician bad tried most all fclndtf of treatment and none Old mo any good, so ho asked my ausbaad if fao objected to him trying a proprietary medicine. X began your Alterative. X was la nod from Xfovember SO, 1908, until February 26, lOS, snd was thought dying several times. Today X am healthier and stronger than over." ' CAbbroTUted.) ' (Signed) HKS. XC- XC BXXXJBT, Eckman's Alterative Is moat effica cious in bronchial catarrh and severe throat and lung affections and upbuild -ins the system. Contains) no harmful or habit-forming drugs. . Accept . no substitutes. Bmau size, si; regular rlee. 12. Bold by leading druggists. Writ for booklet of recoveries. Xokmaa laboratory, XhJladelpMa. . . 'a- AdV.) Them tiny CAPSULES are topcrior ta Balaam er copaiM, Gababe er njeetioas,ad KUJEVES In IMIDYl f 24 HOURS the VX earns dlaeiwi with out inconvenience. Sold by mtldrvggiiU. fe awru m Pric