Medicine: Adding Life to Years

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According to the semilegendary Hippocrates, father of Western medicine, writing 600 years after David, the oldster's lot was not a happy one: "Old men suffer from difficulty of breathing, catarrh accompanied by coughing, difficult micturition, pains at the joints, kidney disease, dizziness, apoplexy, cachexia [wasting], pruritus [itching] of the whole body, sleeplessness, watery discharges from bowels, eyes and nostrils, dullness of sight, cataract, hardness of hearing."

With the addition of such refinements as arteriosclerosis (hardening of the arteries) and hypertension (high blood pressure), medicine remained in general agreement with Hippocrates until this century. The disorders so often seen in the elderly and aging were dubbed "degenerative," or "the diseases of old age," with the emphasis on "of," as though they were inseparable. The very word senile, from a Latin root meaning simply "old," took on a derogatory hue, and a doddering oldster was redundantly tagged "a senile old man."

Exceptions to the Rule. But every age produced a few men who were still great in old age. Plato, who overlapped

Hippocrates, retained his faculties until the end, died (according to Cicero) with "pen in hand" at 80. Michelangelo worked hard as chief architect of St. Peter's Basilica up to his death at 89. Titian, whose birth date is in some doubt, was about 94 when he painted his great Battle of Lepanto, was between 96 and 99 and working on the Pieta at his death. Izaak Walton compleated revising The Compleat Angler at 83. John Wesley was preaching regularly at 88. Benjamin Franklin was a power in the Constitutional Convention at 81, served as president of Pennsylvania to 82. Noah Webster did a new edition of his dictionary at 82, was busy on yet another when he died at 84. Verdi was nudging fourscore when he composed Otello and Falstaff, had passed the mark when he wrote his most diapasonal sacred scores, a Stabat Mater and a Te Deum.

But in the minds of both medical men and laymen, these productive old men could only be exceptions who proved the rule. Shakespeare reflected the widespread feeling of a hundred generations when he called old age "second childishness, and mere oblivion, sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything."

No Monkey Glands. Today's medicine, having taken up the challenge of infectious diseases (the greatest killers of the young down the ages) and conquered most of them, comes now to the challenge of the processes called "chronic diseases" —a term with an unfortunate implication of hopelessness. Today's medicine men neither seek nor expect miracles. They put no stock in parthenotherapy, such as David tried when he took the young Shunammite woman to his bed—though the idea won medical-intellectual backing in the 18th century, is now suggested obliquely by Lolita and Humbert Humbert. Neither have they any use for rejuvenators such as the animal-testicle elixir developed by British Physiologist Brown-Sequard, the severing of the seminal vessels advocated around 1920 by the Austrian Steinach, or the monkey-gland transplants of the long-lived (1866-1951) Serge Voronoff.