Methuselahs Laughed at Doctors.
Some of the modern Methuselahs have been persons who were given up by the doctors to fill an early grave. Surely this fact, taken in connection with the many examples that there are of the great things which invalids have accomplished, ought to bring the champions of euthanasia up short. Perhaps it is too much to expect that anything will stop the man who is once thoroughly launched on this delusive line of thought, but for the sake of the timorous who are not, perhaps, as rugged in health as the men who advocate this “simple and humane” reform, the following examples of men and women, not famous, who have attained to a “green old age” in spite of being in an apparently hopeless condition, are quoted. They are taken from a paper written by E. H. Von den Eynden, of Antwerp, and published there in 1882, under the title “Singularités Macrobiologiques”—(Curiosities of Long Life).
Adèle Lambotte died at Liege in 1763, aged one hundred and one years. She was scarcely thirty-two inches in height, and so crippled in her legs and feet that from infancy she was compelled to walk on crutches.
In 1774 there lived at Château Neuf, in Thimerais, France, a certain demoiselle Thierree. At the time, she was over forty years old, and an invalid, forever taking medicines. A contemporary describes her graphically thus:
“A few tufts of grisly hair, two squinting eyes, lost in the multitude of wrinkles and hanging folds of skin that stood for nose and cheeks, and with a head in perpetual oscillation.”
She lived in the open air, strolling from point to point in all sorts of wind and weather. She enjoyed an income amounting to about one thousand dollars, and some of her friends made her a proposition to transfer their property to her providing she would pay them a certain annuity and devise the property back to them at her death.
The bargain was made, and faithfully kept, as far as the annuity was concerned, yet so skilfully did she manage affairs that she soon had an income of two thousand dollars over and above all expenditures. Her friends meanwhile imagined that they had made a good bargain, as her physician had assured them that she “could never see the return of the swallows next spring.”
The swallows came and went, and came and went again, and they got impatient, and in some way the “old mamselle” found it out. Then she set herself to live in earnest. She wept for Louis XVI, lived through and detested the Revolution, saw the funerals of Bonaparte and Charles X, and lived through the barricades of 1830.
Finally, in 1835, she died, aged one hundred and five years, lacking part of a month. On making an inventory of her affairs her executor found upward of four hundred linen chemises, each made with her own hands, not one of which had ever been worn. Her revenue, at the time of her death, was two hundred thousand dollars.
The people who made the bargain had died one after another, the last one more than forty years before her demise.