One hundred years ago
Dr Richardson, the well-known lecturer on sanitarian questions, the dreamer who dreamed some years ago of the model city of Hygeia, in a lecture delivered on Monday at the London Institution, quoted American statistics to show that intellectual occupations, so far from being less healthy than physical, are at least much more conducive to a long life. Dr Beard, of New York, had shown that the average life-value of 500 men of the highest mental activity, who had already reached the age of twenty, was sixty-four years, whereas the corresponding life-value of other members of society, under the same conditions, was only fifty years. And Dr Beard holds that brain-work is the best of all antidotes to worry. This is very encouraging to brain-workers, and very likely Dr Beard is right. But the main unanswered difficulty is to be sure that you are not mistaking cause for effect, and effect for cause. May it not be that, as a rule, the highest mental activity is possible only to men of energetic vitality, — that it is their high vitality which is the condition of their brain-work, rather than the brainwork which is the cause of their longevity?
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