Читать книгу Old Age Deferred. The causes of old age and its postponement by hygienic and therapeutic measures онлайн

86 страница из 141

From the foregoing there can be no doubt that degenerated conditions of the sexual glands, by producing alterations in important organs, diminish vitality and the chances of an advanced old age.

This seems also to apply to males, for there is no evidence showing that any eunuch has reached a very advanced age, whereas there is plenty of evidence of persons with strong sexual glands having lived far beyond 100 years. The vitality of persons if totally castrated is, as a rule, diminished.

Again if we study the history of persons who attained the maximum span of life, we find many evidences of the existence of strong sexual impulses. Thomas Parr, who lived to nearly 153, has been accused of having committed a sexual offense in his 102d year, for which he was found guilty and punished. Reaching even a greater age, his sexual appetite does not seem to have diminished, for he married, eighteen years after, a widow, who said she could discover nothing that would betray his great age.

Drakenberg, a Dane, who is buried in the cathedral in Aarhus, Denmark, lived 146 years, and reached this advanced age although he was more often drunk than sober. When he was 111 he married a woman of 60, and after she died he fell in love in his 130th year with a young peasant girl; but this blooming flower of the Jutland peninsula, famous for its fresh and healthy girls, refused her ancient wooer, who, nothing daunted, tried his luck with several other young maidens but with no better success; therefore he had perforce to remain a widower, and he lived an additional sixteen years. Possibly if he had addressed widows or elderly spinsters, he might have succeeded; but it is very instructive that this ancient Methuselah insisted on marrying a young girl, which certainly speaks in favor of strong sexual feelings in so old a man, and, indeed, we may say it is an object lesson to us to observe that these ancients were always anxious to marry again so soon as they became widowers. That it was more than a mere formality, or bond of platonic affection, was attested to by Thomas Parr’s wife when he was in his 130th year.