What Killed Jane Austen?: And Other Medical Mysteries

by George Biro

  Gladstone was both smitten and unnerved by Miss Collins, and after 17 meetings of mixing ‘impurity’ and ‘rescue’, he wondered if it were not unlawful. It took an unconscionable time for the politician to make up his mind and he confided to his diary that, paradoxically, the beatings were as much an encouragement as a deterrent for impure temptation. For a man in his position the moral conflict must have been considerable. Nevertheless, when dear Miss Collins migrated to Australia the chance to stop was allowed to slip and she was replaced by others.

  Twice at least he was recognised. With one, blackmail was threatened. Gladstone, fearing for his public credibility, sued, won, and the blackmailer got 12 months’ hard labour!

  The other was even more embarrassing. A well-intentioned but unthinking observer sent a letter to The Times, no less, saying he had seen an elderly man annoying two ladies, but as he recognised the gent to be Gladstone, realised he must have been acting with the ‘highest honour’!

  If those in the public eye find gratification in behaviour which is liable to outrage middle-class morality, better they keep it under wraps; contemporary attitudes may prove to be less tolerant than was the case with W.E. Gladstone or G.P. Grainger.

  (JL)

  9

  Longevity

  The oldest of the old

  In January 1995 Lady Elliot of Harewood died in England at the age of 90. Not a stupendous age nowadays, but two facets of her life made her remarkable. First, she was the first woman—apart from a queen—ever to speak in the House of Lords. Second, and more interestingly as a contributor to medical history, her father was born as long-ago as 1823, when Napoleon was only two years dead and Beethoven finally became stone deaf. More than that, her grandfather was born in 1768, at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution and while Dr Johnson and Mozart were in full flight. So, incredibly, it took 227 years to complete three generations.

  The ‘oldest of the old’ are a fascinating group of people; they are vintage models representing the most indestructible members of society. Mind you, in times past, ages were often exaggerated due to lack of records or poor memory or financial gain.

  For instance, Thomas Parr was reputed to have been 152 when he died in 1635. Despite any doubts which may have been harboured, in his dotage he was well regarded enough to have his portrait painted and later hung in the then new Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. It is still there over 300 years on. William Harvey examined the body but wisely made no comment on the age.

  Englishman Thomas Cam was born in 1471 and was said to have lived through 10 complete reigns until he died aged 207. Actually, on careful examination, the figure 2 has been superimposed over 1 on his tombstone.

  It was not until the 1830s that the recording of dates of births became compulsory in Western countries and we got some order into things.

  According to the Guinness Book of Records (1994 edition), the oldest person authentically recorded in Australia was Caroline Maud Mockridge. She was born on 11 December 1874 and died aged 112 years 330 days on 8 November 1987. In 1992 there were about 1,500 centenarians in Australia.

  For years it was claimed that the oldest person ever to have survived with provable dates was a man from a remote Japanese island. Born in 1865, he died in 1986 aged 120 years and 237 days. He worked on the farm until he was 105, took up smoking at the age of 70 and attributed his long life to ‘God, Buddha and the Sun’ (not smoking, thank goodness). But even this great age has been superseded by a grand old lady, Jeanne Calment. She lived in Arles, France, and was born in 1875. As a girl she met Vincent Van Gogh, whom she described as ‘scruffy’. She died in 1997 aged 122.

  Famous people who have cracked the 100 are Grandma Moses, the ‘Primitive Painter’ from America, who died aged 101, and Irving Berlin, the composer, also 101 at the end. Comedian George Burns at 97 said he could not die—he’s booked. He eventually succumbed in 1996 at the age of 100 years and two months.

  The last surviving soldier of the American Civil War died in 1959, 94 years after it had finished. According to the Weekly Telegraph of February 1994, the oldest working man in Britain was a 94-year-old motorcycle repair man in Birmingham who planned to ride his bike to see the Queen on his 100th birthday.

  The 20th century has seen a dramatic increase in Western average life expectancy, from about 47 in 1900 to about 74.5 in males and 80 in females in the late 1990s. It has been postulated that if the body could retain its teenage physiology we could live for about 700 years. Though there are grounds for believing there is a finite lifespan, it may be longer than currently thought.

  Though improving health status and independence are allowing more people to survive into very old age (over 85), there are no signs yet of any extension of the upper limit of human life. Between 1981 and 1991 the number of centenarians in the UK doubled, a trend projected to accelerate. In 1992 there were about 40,000 centenarians recorded worldwide, only 22 per cent of whom were men. It may be women encounter fewer hazards, such as war, work accidents, smoking and heart disease. Further, perinatal and some bacterial-caused mortality is greater in the male; perhaps the immune response is different in each.

  Genetic influences, immune response, stress levels and environmental aspects contribute to the prolongation of life. All are factors which could account for the disproportionate number of grand seniors in three unique areas of the world.

  Abkhazia, Georgia, in southern Russia between the Black and Caspian seas has always been on the crossroads of history and is well known for its centenarians. By contrast, Hunza, between Kashmir and Afghanistan, and Vilcabamba, Ecuador, in the Andean foothills breed their champions in remote splendour.

  Documentation is rare, so years are estimated by major events—marriage, war service, heavy winters and so on. Correlating all factors, researchers have found discrepancies. For instance, a father’s age may have been used to avoid military service and then retained.

  Nonetheless, old age is a proved and common characteristic of the areas, and to the accepted theories have been added: pace of life (compare the giant tortoise with an average age of 120), physical activity, diet, and lack of self-abuse with drugs including nicotine, alcohol and the like. What has never been found is a fountain of magical spring water.

  The longest living things of all are, of course, trees, the leader being a Bristlecone pine in Nevada at a verified 4,900 years.

  Fascinating stories of distant personal contacts occasionally occupy the correspondence columns of The Times. Each tries to outdo the others. My only claim is that as a boy I (JL) met a man who had sat through the whole of the first ever Test Match in 1877! Or so he said.

  Perhaps author Antonia Fraser has the best story. She recounts how as a child in Oxford in the 1930s she had met people who had known Dr Martin Routh of Magdalen College. He died in 1854 aged 99, and claimed that when young he had known an old lady who as a girl had seen Charles II walking his spaniels. As Charles died in 1685, this time stretch vies with that of Lady Elliot; perhaps akin to the tenuous contact in the song ‘I danced with a man who danced with a girl who danced with the Prince of Wales’.

  Can anyone challenge it?

  (JL)

  Alchemy, body-freezing or virgin’s blood?

  It’s not the men in my life that counts—it’s the life in my men (Mae West)

  Have you heard of the man whose lifelong ambition was to live to be 90 and then be shot dead by a jealous husband?

  Alchemy, body-freezing, virgin’s blood and snake venom are just a few of the devices we have used in our quest for a vigorous long life.

  Movie actor George Burns’s formula was optimism: ‘With a little luck, there’s no reason why you can’t live to be 100. Then you’ve got it made, because very few people die over 100.’ And of course, Burns did make 100. Englishwoman Edith Beck would have made a good match for George Burns; on her 103rd birthday, she decided to look after her health and give up smoking. At 117, Leliai Omar Bin Datuk Panglima of Malaysia cycled 43 kilometres to marr
y his 40-year-old fiancée (his 18th wife)!

  Many cultures hold that humans were once immortal. Tithonus, the Trojan, loved Eos, the goddess of dawn. She persuaded Zeus to make Tithonus immortal, but forgot to ask for his eternal youth. In the end, poor old Tithonus could only sit babbling in a locked room, so she changed him into a grasshopper.

  Elixirs of life are prominent in Hindu, Hebrew, Arab and Greek cultures.

  Over the centuries, many alchemists have been loonies, charlatans and plain quacks, but alchemy has also attracted respectable scientists like Isaac Newton. Alchemists pursued two main goals: to turn base metals into gold, and to produce an Elixir of Life.

  In the 1st century BC, a Chinese alchemist advised his emperor to transmute mercury into gold, turn it into cutlery, eat with it, and so become immortal. Nothing to it!

  The unconventional Swiss physician-alchemist Paracelsus (1493–1541) claimed to have distilled a potion of immortality from mercury.

  The Italian adventurer who called himself Count Alessandro di Cagliostro (1743–1795) was short, fat, ugly, unwashed, rude and boastful. But he toured Europe in great style as an alchemist, flogging two famous elixirs. The first merely stopped a man from aging further, but the second rejuvenated him by ten, twenty or even thirty years. The proof? Cagliostro himself. He was thousands of years old, and remembered everything: the building of the Pyramids, the Roman emperors—history’s greatest name-dropper!

  The first elixir was blood. Romans drank the blood of slain gladiators. Some despots killed young virgins so they could drink or bathe in their blood, while others merely sucked their milk or inhaled their breath. Consider also the Christian practice of Holy Communion, in which wine representing the blood of Jesus is drunk: ‘Whoso … drinketh my blood, hath eternal life’ (John 6:54).

  Tribes in India reportedly lived 400 years by eating snakes. Prescriptions included an ounce of snake’s urine, taken every morning for 15 days, every year, especially in spring. Snakes moulting were thought to be rejuvenating themselves. Hence, snakeflesh would rejuvenate humans, as would chickens fed on minced snake and even eggs laid by snake-fed birds.

  In 1492, a Jewish physician transfused Pope Innocent VIII with the blood of several young men who then quickly died. When the pope died as well, the doctor had to make himself scarce.

  One recipe for a long and healthy life is to eat less. This is not a new idea. Ecclesiasticus (37:24) warns us about overeating: ‘By surfeiting many have perished: but he that is temperate, shall prolong life.’

  The Venetian nobleman Luigi Cornaro confessed in his Discourses on the Sober Life (1558) that riotous living had left him at the age of 45 with gout, fever and stomach pains. His doctors gave him up, but he became a model of temperance and lived to 103.

  The German physician Christoph Hufeland (1762–1836) wrote lifestyle and diet recipes that anticipated modern diets, not only in content, but also in the title: Makrobiotik.

  The message today is similar: eat less, but have enough fibre, protein, fat, vitamins and minerals. Animal experiments show that this actually works.

  Dairy farmers should forever toast the Russian Nobel Prize winner of 1908, microbiologist Ilya Metchnikoff (1845–1916). He attributed ageing largely to a ‘putrefying bowel’ (slow poisoning by toxins produced by bowel bacteria). Among his fans was Louis Armstrong, who took nightly laxatives and lived to the age of 71, and Mae West, who was hooked on daily enemas and lived to 87.

  Metchnikoff attributed the longevity of Bulgarians partly to their yoghurt, in which he found bacteria that eliminated the noxious bacteria in the bowel. In his lab, Metchnikoff kept a large pot of Bulgarian yoghurt, which he offered to all visitors. To this day, New Zealand makes Metchnikoff yoghurt with natural acidophilus and bifidus ‘to aid digestion’.

  Another popular way to keep down the nasty bugs in your bowel was to have part of it surgically removed.

  In the 1920s Dr John Brinkley of Kansas ran his own radio station KFKB (‘Kansas First, Kansas Best’). Between fundamentalist sermons and country music, he talked into his gold-plated microphone and promoted his method of rejuvenation: transplanting slices of goat testicles into grateful old men. Before losing his licence in 1929, he earned over US$1 million a year and was able to lend one of his three yachts to the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. By contrast, Henry Leighton Jones (1868–1943) of Morisset, New South Wales, who transplanted monkey glands in the 1930s, was a reputable mainstream GP.

  Swiss physician Paul Niehans injected cells from unborn lambs into Konrad Adenauer, Winston Churchill, Pope Pius XII and Charlie Chaplin. Dr Ana Aslan spent years promoting Gerovital, which contained novocaine (a local anaesthetic) plus a secret ingredient. During the 1950s she treated over 5,000 elderly patients, including Somerset Maugham, Charles de Gaulle, and Konrad Adenauer (who tried everything, but died in 1967 at the age of 81 nonetheless).

  Some optimists have frozen themselves into suspended animation and waited for medical miracles to revive them. This freeze-thaw technique (cryonics) started with physicist Robert Ettinger in the 1950s. Even now, the faithful lie patiently frozen in cryonics centres all over world.

  One of the cyronics centres, the Alcor Life Extension Foundation in California, hit the headlines in 1988. Inside a vat of liquid nitrogen somebody found the frozen bodyless head of Dora Kent, mother of cryonics guru Saul Kent. Allegedly, Kent had first transferred her from a convalescent home as she was near death (then 83), then had her decapitated and frozen without medical help. But was she alive before she lost her head? The police found four more frozen heads and a frozen body; the lawyers had a ball.

  There is an even simpler approach to death—denial. Columnist Peter Smark wrote in the Sydney Morning Herald of 15 November 1997: ‘The American middle class, for instance, firmly believes that death is optional. So when a member of the group dies, it is his or her own fault. Or a doctor’s. Or an accountant’s. A lawsuit often results.’

  There are three regions in the world—Abkhazia, Hunza and Vilcabamba—in which we still hear of active, healthy people living to even 150. We can speculate about these pockets of longevity. Is it their active lifestyles, freedom from stress or sparse diets? Or is it merely their poor record-keeping and illiteracy? Whereas trees have rings and fish have scales, there are no accurate markers of human age.

  The consensus view doubts whether people have actually lived beyond 110 or 120 years. Most of us will not get as far as that: our own biological clocks make it unlikely that we will match George Burns and reach 100.

  The maximum lifespan has probably not increased greatly over the centuries. What has changed is the average life expectancy at birth.

  There’s a definite gender difference in longevity: 78 per cent of the world’s recorded centenarians are female. Moreover, spinsters outlive married women, whereas married men outlive bachelors. All this reinforces the feminist messages: women are stronger, and marriage is great for guys, but woeful for women.

  If you’re looking for longevity, choose the right ancestors. To estimate your life expectancy, take the average years of life of your parents and all four grandparents.

  But don’t stop there: improve your odds by working on your lifestyle and risk factors.

  Some enthusiasts recommend taking melatonin, while others pin their hopes on DHEA (de-hydro-epi-androsterone).

  Travel can work wonders too. Japan has bathhouses with solid-gold tubs. True believers pay heaps to soak there. Don’t laugh—the Japanese live longer than people of any other country.

  (GB)

  A Final Word: Can Immunisation Alone Save Third World Children?

  Fog had delayed the tiny plane; everyone in the tiny mountain village high in the Andes was still waiting. Then a message came: the pilot would have to come after dark.

  Children ran all around the village, calling out: ‘The pilot is coming; come and bring a torch for him.’

  Young and old doused sticks with kerosene, lit them, and lined up on the grass strip. The pilot
landed safely, and everyone helped to unload his precious cargo.

  Half an hour later, the first outraged baby squawked as she got her jab of vaccine.

  How well does vaccination protect today’s Third World children against infectious diseases?

  The greatest killers of children in developing countries are diarrhoeal disease and acute respiratory (chest) infection, for many of which we lack good vaccines.

  Each year, six preventable diseases (tuberculosis, measles, tetanus, whooping cough, diphtheria, and polio) kill 1.5 million to 2 million children. The measles death rates are about 400 times those of the West.

  Almost half a million newborn babies in developing countries die each year of tetanus, an infection that doctors in the West hardly ever see in newborn babies.

  This form of tetanus follows lack of immunisation of mothers and contamination during childbirth. Local midwives often cut the umbilical cord with a dirty razor blade, a sliver of bamboo or even a blade of tough grass, and then cover the stump with dung or mud.

  The tragedies extend beyond the deaths: each year, there are about 100,000 new victims of polio. Malnutrition, measles, and whooping cough disable many others.

  The good news is that each year, increased immunisation is saving the lives of about 3 million children. Childhood measles deaths have fallen from 2 million in 1985 to 1.1 million in 1996.

  Since it started in 1974, the Expanded Program on Immunisation (EPI) of the World Health Organisation (WHO) and the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) has been very effective.

  For the six diseases mentioned (tuberculosis, measles, tetanus, whooping cough, diphtheria, and polio), EPI has raised the immunisation rate of children under one year of age from 5 per cent to about 80 per cent. This 80 per cent represents over 100 million children.