TIE ABERRATION-PERIOD OF MIDDLE LIFE.
. [TO THE EDITOR OP THE "SPECTATOR."] Stn,—I have .read very carefully the evidence given at the Slough inquest, and I have noted your remarks thereupon (Spectator, June 30th), and I hope you will kindly allow me to state an entirely personal, but I believe correct physical, view in reference to the " aberration " of the poor engine-driver. In my humble opinion no man fifty-nine years of age ought to be allowed to drive an express train, and for the reason (in my view, I commit no one else to it, nor do I wish to state it as a well-known medical fact, because I think it is far too often ignored) that men, like women, pass through a period of climacteric—men later than women by about ten years—at and during which time the equal exercise of full and complete powers of observation is often in temporary abeyance. A great London physician (I do not like to give his name, but he was master to many of us in the " sixties ") during the interval of age between fifty-five and sixty-two years found himself completely unable to depend (as he said) " not on his observation, but on his application of it." He remem- bered he had noted a particular physical sign, for instance, in a chest he was examining, but he failed to remember its due weight when he came to give his opinion on the case, and when reminded of it said, " 0 yes, of course," and then amended his judgment by its light. Now, the temporary ignoring of an observation may be entirely harmless in a physician with other observers near to correct him ; in a Judge with the whole Court keen for immediate or eventual appeal ; in the case even of a Commander-in-Chief, subject possibly to a whispered protest within the bounds of discipline, but to an engine-driver that second of clouded intelligence may be supreme and irrecoverable; that interval of " blank " can never possibly be atoned for. And my opinion is that after the age of fifty-seven years (I name this precise age after considerable observation, but even fifty-five years might be safer) express-train driving should cease. I do not think that the influence of the male climacteric is quite suf- ficiently realised in the production of what we call " aberra- tion." The condition is not so much "deviation from the right way " as a sort of blank, not as to recording an impres- sion, but as to applying it. "I did not realise it," is surely a frequent expression of middle life.—I am, Sir, &c., Slianklin, Isle of Wight. GEOIIGE H. R. DABBS, M.D.
Previous page
