Medicine: Adding Life to Years

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The drives that dominate Sloan and Kettering are essentially different from Stagg's. Neither automan has ever been interested in reforming the world in conventional do-gooder style. Both have displayed a knack (which indicates at least a strong unconscious urge) for moneymaking, whereas Stagg, though usually underpaid, has turned down fortunes offered by Hollywood. Yet both Sloan and Kettering have turned, in advanced years, to philanthropy of a highly practical sort: the two are forever commemorated in Manhattan's Sloan-Kettering Institute, research arm of Memorial Center for Cancer and Allied Diseases (TIME, June 27, 1949). Individually, each has set up a namesake foundation to advance the education and careers of promising young scientists. Sloan and Kettering are alike in enjoying superb physical health—better than Stagg's when he was their age.

Dedication & Stress. Evidently stress by itself need not be a killer, for there is plenty of it for a coach in Big Ten football. Certainly no man in big business has faced much severer stress than did Sloan as G.M.'s chief executive officer in the era of big unions, big strikes and the biggest war.

But one who can justly claim that no man was ever under heavier or more cruel stress and survived it in good mental and physical health is Herbert Hoover, 84. One of only five U.S. Presidents to have reached fourscore, and the first in 100 years,*Hoover endured not only the emotional torment of a presidency that spanned most of the Depression, but two decades of obloquy in which his name was equated with economic disaster and social injustice. A poor boy who, like Stagg, got his early exercise involuntarily, and a self-made millionaire like Sloan and Kettering, Herbert Hoover has long since dropped the daily gym exercises that won him fame as head of the "medicine-ball Cabinet." Still, his energy seems almost unlimited. He rises early, usually around 6:30, is at his desk in his Waldorf-Astoria office by 9:30 a.m., directing a platoon of secretaries and research assistants, writing manuscripts (most notably and recently, The Ordeal of Woodrow Wilson) in longhand. Though he naps for an hour or two after lunch, Hoover is far from having slowed his overall pace: he works seven days a week. Almost every night he has guests for dinner, which is preceded by two martinis (the only time he drinks), and he follows the meal with canasta, at which he is a whiz.

Spiritual dedication, though clearly not essential, appears to be a life-prolonging factor in many cases. Outstanding among long-lived divines is the Rev. Dr. Arthur

Judson Brown, 101, longtime secretary of the Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions, who was active until close to the century mark. And at that milestone, he was forward-looking enough to say: "I do not sympathize with the common lament that young people today are not what they used to be. Thank God they are not!"

And never in the 1,900-year history of the papacy has there been a clearer example of the life-giving powers of devotion to piety and duty (though there were longer-lived Popes) than Pius XII. Though he had been severely ill several times, and was eventually found to have a hiatus hernia (TIME, Dec. 27, 1954), he functioned with full efficiency well beyond his 80th birthday and until the strokes that swiftly killed him (see RELIGION).