LONGEVITY AND BRAIN-WORK.
DR. BEARD, of New York, whose interesting paper on the rela- tive ereative power of Youth and Age respectively we noticed in our issue of the 21st March, has just written another paper in some respects of still higher general interest, on "The Longevity of Brain-workers." It takes as its text,—if a text may be what it now often is, the embodiment of the theory which the writer intends to refute rather than to assume or sustain,—a saying of Mr. Thomas Hughes's, that " the world's hardest workers and noblest benefactors have seldom been long-lived " ; and the object of the paper is to show, on the contrary, that the world's hardest workers and noblest benefactors would, if their ages at death could be all ascertained, show at least a very high average of life,—a much higher average than the world's drones, and those who had not added anything to its accumulated capital of happiness, knowledge, goodness, and truth. On the whole, Dr. Beard proves his case, but he proves it only on the supposition that the term " hardest workers " and " noblest benefactors " is somewhat liberally interpreted. Indeed, if, as we suppose, Mr. Hughes were referring to the case of King Alfred the Great —in the story of whose life it occurs—when he made the remark against which Dr. Beard has taken the trouble to pro- test so elaborately, it was obvious that what he did mean was rather that lives, otherwise likely to be long, are shortened by the moral pressure of any intense strain, than that great men of this high calibre die absolutely young ; for Alfred himself was 52, or very nearly 52, when he died, and that is, according to Dr. Beard, two years above the average age of all who pass the age of twenty. So that Mr. Hughes was probably only speaking of long life in that stronger sense in which we should use the words in reference to a life already conspicuously useful,— which it rarely is till it has passed considerably the time of youth. In fact, Dr. Beard's paper, properly read, rather supports than overthrows the view that the hardest work and the noblest endeavour will generally tend to shorten the life which those who spend themselves in this way might otherwise have lived. For Dr. Beard himself shows that, as a rule, a brain of exceptional force goes with a constitution of exceptionally good fibre, so that quite apart from the work actually done, the class in any way competent to do it must show a much higher average of life than ordinary men. It would be probably very easy to show that, as a rule, the best carpenters' tools last the longest time, as well as do the greatest amount of work. But it would not in the least follow from that that the unsparing use of them does not tend to wear them out much sooner than a more sparing use. Theylast longer than poorer tools, because they are better to begin with. But the same metal and the same tempering being assumed, unquestionably the tools used sparingly—only enough to keep them in working-order —would last much longer than those unsparingly used. And so it is probably with human brains. Men who do great things must, as a rule, have stronger brains, to begin with, than men of average calibre. If, then, they live a good deal beyond the average, it is because they have robust constitutions which would naturally give them a life much beyond the average. Not the less is it moat improbable that those who are "the world's hardest workers and noblest benefactors " can live to the age to which they might well have lived had they husbanded their strength more carefully, and not expended themselves so lavishly in the regeneration of the world. To take a few instances almost at haphazard :—Luther died at 63 ; St. Francis de Sales, at 55 ; John Howard, at 63 ; Elizabeth Fry, at 65 ; Cromwell, at 59 ; Whitefield, at 56 ; Wesley, at 87 ; Lacordaire, at 59 ; Maurice, at 67 ; John Stuart Mill, at 66 ; and hardly of any of them, except perhaps of Mill and Wesley, can it be said with any probability, on a review of their lives, that they might not have materially lengthened their days by economising more carefully their expenditure of moral and intellectual energy ; nay, that they did not substantially shorten them by a lavish and exhausting use of their moral power. But then, to do what they did they must have been men of more than ordinary constitu- tioial strength, and the proper question to ask about their longevity is not whether they lived beyond the average age of men who pass the age of 20, but whether they did not materially shorten their life by the intensity of their work. Dr. Beard vir- tually concedes this point when he tells us that " worry is the converse of work ; the one develops force, the other checks its development and wastes what already exists." But worry is an almost necessary incident of really high-pressure work. If men do not feel sure that they can do in the time the work appointed for the time, worry is inevitable. Nay, if men have a higher ideal of the kind of work they ought to do, and of ' the quantity of work they ought to do, than they can adequately realise, it is hardly possible to doubt that it must involve a considerable amount of worry as well as of work ; and that worry, as Dr. Beard himself contends, will probably have shortened a life, that without it might have been longer. Indeed, Dr. Beard virtually shows that it is not the most exhausting work which really is most favourable to length of life, when he pro- duces the American clergy as the class whose average life is the longest. That is in itself a proof that it is moderate rather than exhausting and high-pressure brain-work which is most favourable to length of life. At least, if we may judge of the American clergy by our own, it would be generally admitted that the clerical profession is that in which the brain-work is in fair, and not more than fair, proportion to the bodily activity, and not, on the average, likely to be excessive. Indeed, it cannot well be contended that there is anything exceptional in the mental wear and tear of the American as distinguished from the English clergy, for Dr. Beard quotes confirmatory statistics from the in- vestigations of a Berlin physician. That investigation gives the following results,—results, we suppose, assuming that the profes- sional persons on whom the average is taken have passed maturity : —that the average age of clergymen is 65 ; that of merchants, 62 ; clerks and farmers, 61 ; military men, 59 ; lawyers, 58 ; artists, 57 ; and medical men, 56. In America, apparently, the average length of life seems somewhat lower, but the relative length is much the same; while in England Dr. Beard appears to think that the average age of medical men is a good deal higher than in the United States. No doubt the moral restraints upon the clergy tend to raise the average duration of their lives, but the comparatively harmonious development given to their physical, intellectual, moral, and emotional life,—in all countries at least where the clergy are not celibate,—no doubt has, more than any other cause, to do with the relatively high average of their life. Had Dr. Beard been able to give us statistics of any value about journalists and those who really live by exciting literary work, we suspect he would have found that the life-rate was about the lowest on his list, and hardly above that of the highly skilled manual labourers.
Dr. Beard even maintains that precocity of development, so far from being premonitory of early death, is almost always a mark of great talents, and usually, therefore, of the constitutional strength of brain which accompanies great talents. A Mr. Winterburn, who had investigated two hundred and thirteen cases of the age of acknowledged musical prodigies, found that their average age at the time of death was 58, " while some attained the age of 103." But Dr. Beard has more solid facts to go upon than that. He himself had examined the age attained by five hundred of the most eminent men in history, including many who, like Raphael, Pascal, Mozart, Byron, and Keats, died young, and he found the average -age of these five hundred eminent men to be 64 years and between two andthree months. But of these, about one hundred and fifty were decidedly precocious. Now, of these precocious geniuses, the average age at the time of death was 66 and six months,—in other words, more than two years higher than the average of the whole five hundred, and three years higher than that of the 456 who were not precocious. This seems to show that the phrase " too clever to live " is a completely erroneous one. Great talent is pretty sure to give early proof of its existence, and so far from showing that the physical vitality must have prematurely passed into the nerves, this precocious capacity is a mere natural indication of the centre and seat of special power. Hence it would seem that not only is brain-work no hindrance to lon- gevity, but precocious brain-work is no hindrance to longevity, so long as it is easy and does not strain the mind. We• may be quite sure that if " worry" is so destructive to health as Dr. Beard thinks, premature worry is still more so, and that all hard tasking of a child's capacities must be mischievous, though their spontaneous working can hardly be anything but healthy and beneficial.
But perhaps the most striking and satisfactory of all Dr. Beard's results is his statement,—we wish he had given in detail the facts on which the opinion is founded,—that the brain- worker, the man with a well-exercised nervous system, has a system much better protected against febrile and inflammatory disorders than men who are chiefly muscle-workers. "This was shown," says Dr. Beard, "in the late war [the Civil War], when delicate, ensanguined youth, followed by the fear of friends, went forth to camp and battle, and not only survived, but grew stout amid exposures that prostrated by thousands the lumbermen of Maine and thesons of the plough and the anvil." And he adds, " Mystudies have shown that, of distinctively nervous diseases, those which have the worst pathology and are the most hopeless, such as loco- motor ataxia, progressive muscular atrophy, apoplexy with bend- plegia, and so on, are more common and more severe and morefatal among the comparatively strong and tough than among the most delicate and finely organised. Cancer even goes hardest with the hardy, and is most relievable in the nervous." If that can be substantiated, no doubt it shows that the habitual exercise of the 'brain modifies the more purely animal and vegetable functions of the constitution for the better, quite apart from the conditions favourable to comfort and convenience which it generally introduces into our external life. If educated men are less liable to, or less prostrated by, malarious fevers (say) than half-educated or un- educated men, if paralysis is commoner or comes earlier with the artisan and the labourer than with the lawyer or the physician,,- then surely Dr. Beard has proved his point that the habitual exercise of the brain is in a high degree favourable to the life and strength of man. Dr. Beard goes even further, and ascribes a great deal of the power of recovery manifested by the culti- vated classes to " force of will." " One does not need to practise medicine long to learn that men die who might just as well live, if they resolved to live ; and that myriads who are invalids might become strong, if they had the nature or acquired will to vow that they would do so. Those who have no other quality favourable to life, whose bodily organs are nearly all diseased, to whom each day is a day of pain, who are beset by life-shortening influences, yet do live by grit alone. Races and the sexes illustrate this. The pluck of the Anglo-Saxon is shown as much on the sick-bed as in Wall Street or on the battle-field. During the late war I had chances enough to see how thorougly the black man wilted under light sickness, and was slain by disease over which his white brother would have easily triumphed." Yes, but was that due to ' will,' or to the special nervous development which almost always accompanies ' will' ? Is not Dr. Beard really illustrating the advantage of a developed brain in its effect on the physical constitution over again, instead of showing that force of will has very much to do with the power of a system to re- sist disease? It seems likely enough that a highly-developed brain means a larger latent stock of vital power, a larger re- serve-force when the superficial supply is drained by sickness, and if that be so, what looks like want of will is really nothing but want of the latent energy which will calls out. The General who has exhausted his reserves succumbs because he is conscious of having no reserves, and so the Negro who has no superfluous stock of nervous life, when his stock of muscular and sensuous life is exhausted, succumbs because he is aware of no unexhausted stock of vitality, each as that of which the Anglo-Saxon, under the same circumstances, would really be aware, because he would possess it. Developed brain may well be additional life, not only in the sense in which it certainly is so, namely, an additional sphere of activity both for thought and feeling, but also in the sense of additional power of resistance to the inroads of disease, additional power of life, additional forts, within which the life takes refuge till those diseases which are of a periodic character have exhausted their power, and the whole body can be once more restored to health.
But valuable as are Dr. Beard's conclusions, he certainly does not prove that the quality and quantity of work done by the world's greatest benefactors has not, on the whole, been very frequently injurious to their health, and even fatal to the hopes they might otherwise have entertained of a long life. Unquestionably, such benefactors have picked lives ; but these picked lives are often, perhaps generally, used up sooner than they otherwise would have been, by excessive drains upon very finite stocks of vital force. Dr. Beard has no doubt brought additional evidence of the wisdom of the proverb " better wear out than rust out." But he has not done anything to disprove that, with an equal start, people who neither wear out nor rust out will be likely to have a longer life than either the one class or the other.
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