Galen, speaking of Hippocrates, and wishing to represent in one word the man who, in his eyes, constitutes the most perfect type of slowly matured wisdom and profound experience, simply calls him the old man.
The first rule of the Art of Preserving Life is to know how to be old. “Few men know how to be old,” said La Rochefoucauld. Voltaire has—
Qui n’a pas l’esprit de son âge,
De son âge a tous les malheurs.
The first rule is more philosophic than medical, but is perhaps none the less valuable.
The second rule is to know yourself well; which is also a philosophical precept applied to medicine.
The third rule is properly to conform to regular habits. Old men, who spend one day like another, with the same moderation, the same appetites, live always. “My miracle is existence,” said Voltaire; and if that foolish vanity which never grows old had not induced him, when eighty-four years of age, to make a ridiculous journey to Paris, his miracle would have continued a century, as was the case with Fontenelle.
“Few would believe,” said M. Reveillé-Parise, “how far a little health, well managed, may be made to go.” And Cicero said: “To use what we have, and to act in every thing according to our strength,—such is the rule of the sage.”
Most men die of disease, very few die of mere age. Man has made for himself a sort of artificial life, in which the moral is often worse than the physical; and the physical itself often worse than it would be with habits more serene and calm, more regularly and judiciously exercised.
Haller, the physiologist, says: “Man should be placed among the animals that live the longest: how very unjust, then, are our complaints of the brevity of life!” He then inquires what can be the extreme limit of the life of man; and he gives it as his opinion that man might live not less than two centuries. M. Flourens,[[36]] however, decides on a century of ordinary life; and at least half a century of extraordinary life is the prospect science holds out to man. Still, as these inferences are drawn from the exceptions of Jenkins and Parr, the opinions must be received accordingly.