What Killed Jane Austen?: And Other Medical Mysteries (21 page)

Elixirs of life are prominent in Hindu, Hebrew, Arab and Greek cultures.

Over the centuries, many alchemists have been loonies, charlatans and plain quacks, but alchemy has also attracted respectable scientists like Isaac Newton. Alchemists pursued two main goals: to turn base metals into gold, and to produce an Elixir of Life.

In the 1st century BC, a Chinese alchemist advised his emperor to transmute mercury into gold, turn it into cutlery, eat with it, and so become immortal. Nothing to it!

The unconventional Swiss physician-alchemist Paracelsus (1493–1541) claimed to have distilled a potion of immortality from mercury.

The Italian adventurer who called himself Count Alessandro di Cagliostro (1743–1795) was short, fat, ugly, unwashed, rude and boastful. But he toured Europe in great style as an alchemist, flogging two famous elixirs. The first merely stopped a man from aging further, but the second rejuvenated him by ten, twenty or even thirty years. The proof? Cagliostro himself. He was thousands of years old, and remembered everything: the building of the Pyramids, the Roman emperors—history’s greatest name-dropper!

The first elixir was blood. Romans drank the blood of slain gladiators. Some despots killed young virgins so they could drink or bathe in their blood, while others merely sucked their milk or inhaled their breath. Consider also the Christian practice of Holy Communion, in which wine representing the blood of Jesus is drunk: ‘Whoso … drinketh my blood, hath eternal life’ (John 6:54).

Tribes in India reportedly lived 400 years by eating snakes. Prescriptions included an ounce of snake’s urine, taken every morning for 15 days, every year, especially in spring. Snakes moulting were thought to be rejuvenating themselves. Hence, snakeflesh would rejuvenate humans, as would chickens fed on minced snake and even eggs laid by snake-fed birds.

In 1492, a Jewish physician transfused Pope Innocent VIII with the blood of several young men who then quickly died. When the pope died as well, the doctor had to make himself scarce.

One recipe for a long and healthy life is to eat less. This is not a new idea. Ecclesiasticus (37:24) warns us about overeating: ‘By surfeiting many have perished: but he that is temperate, shall prolong life.’

The Venetian nobleman Luigi Cornaro confessed in his
Discourses on the Sober Life
(1558) that riotous living had left him at the age of 45 with gout, fever and stomach pains. His doctors gave him up, but he became a model of temperance and lived to 103.

The German physician Christoph Hufeland (1762–1836) wrote lifestyle and diet recipes that anticipated modern diets, not only in content, but also in the title:
Makrobiotik
.

The message today is similar: eat less, but have enough fibre, protein, fat, vitamins and minerals. Animal experiments show that this actually works.

Dairy farmers should forever toast the Russian Nobel Prize winner of 1908, microbiologist Ilya Metchnikoff (1845–1916). He attributed ageing largely to a ‘putrefying bowel’ (slow poisoning by toxins produced by bowel bacteria). Among his fans was Louis Armstrong, who took nightly laxatives and lived to the age of 71, and Mae West, who was hooked on daily enemas and lived to 87.

Metchnikoff attributed the longevity of Bulgarians partly to their yoghurt, in which he found bacteria that eliminated the noxious bacteria in the bowel. In his lab, Metchnikoff kept a large pot of Bulgarian yoghurt, which he offered to all visitors. To this day, New Zealand makes Metchnikoff yoghurt with natural acidophilus and bifidus ‘to aid digestion’.

Another popular way to keep down the nasty bugs in your bowel was to have part of it surgically removed.

In the 1920s Dr John Brinkley of Kansas ran his own radio station KFKB (‘Kansas First, Kansas Best’). Between fundamentalist sermons and country music, he talked into his gold-plated microphone and promoted his method of rejuvenation: transplanting slices of goat testicles into grateful old men. Before losing his licence in 1929, he earned over US$1 million a year and was able to lend one of his three yachts to the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. By contrast, Henry Leighton Jones (1868–1943) of Morisset, New South Wales, who transplanted monkey glands in the 1930s, was a reputable mainstream GP.

Swiss physician Paul Niehans injected cells from unborn lambs into Konrad Adenauer, Winston Churchill, Pope Pius XII and Charlie Chaplin. Dr Ana Aslan spent years promoting Gerovital, which contained novocaine (a local anaesthetic) plus a secret ingredient. During the 1950s she treated over 5,000 elderly patients, including Somerset Maugham, Charles de Gaulle, and Konrad Adenauer (who tried everything, but died in 1967 at the age of 81 nonetheless).

Some optimists have frozen themselves into suspended animation and waited for medical miracles to revive them. This freeze-thaw technique (cryonics) started with physicist Robert Ettinger in the 1950s. Even now, the faithful lie patiently frozen in cryonics centres all over world.

One of the cyronics centres, the Alcor Life Extension Foundation in California, hit the headlines in 1988. Inside a vat of liquid nitrogen somebody found the frozen bodyless head of Dora Kent, mother of cryonics guru Saul Kent. Allegedly, Kent had first transferred her from a convalescent home as she was near death (then 83), then had her decapitated and frozen without medical help. But was she alive before she lost her head? The police found four more frozen heads and a frozen body; the lawyers had a ball.

There is an even simpler approach to death—denial. Columnist Peter Smark wrote in the
Sydney Morning Herald
of 15 November 1997: ‘The American middle class, for instance, firmly believes that death is optional. So when a member of the group dies, it is his or her own fault. Or a doctor’s. Or an accountant’s. A lawsuit often results.’

There are three regions in the world—Abkhazia, Hunza and Vilcabamba—in which we still hear of active, healthy people living to even 150. We can speculate about these pockets of longevity. Is it their active lifestyles, freedom from stress or sparse diets? Or is it merely their poor record-keeping and illiteracy? Whereas trees have rings and fish have scales, there are no accurate markers of human age.

The consensus view doubts whether people have actually lived beyond 110 or 120 years. Most of us will not get as far as that: our own biological clocks make it unlikely that we will match George Burns and reach 100.

The
maximum
lifespan has probably not increased greatly over the centuries. What has changed is the
average
life expectancy at birth.

There’s a definite gender difference in longevity: 78 per cent of the world’s recorded centenarians are female. Moreover, spinsters outlive married women, whereas married men outlive bachelors. All this reinforces the feminist messages: women are stronger, and marriage is great for guys, but woeful for women.

If you’re looking for longevity, choose the right ancestors. To estimate your life expectancy, take the average years of life of your parents and all four grandparents.

But don’t stop there: improve your odds by working on your lifestyle and risk factors.

Some enthusiasts recommend taking melatonin, while others pin their hopes on DHEA (de-hydro-epi-androsterone).

Travel can work wonders too. Japan has bathhouses with solid-gold tubs. True believers pay heaps to soak there. Don’t laugh—the Japanese live longer than people of any other country.

(GB)

Fog had delayed the tiny plane; everyone in the tiny mountain village high in the Andes was still waiting. Then a message came: the pilot would have to come after dark.

Children ran all around the village, calling out: ‘The pilot is coming; come and bring a torch for him.’

Young and old doused sticks with kerosene, lit them, and lined up on the grass strip. The pilot landed safely, and everyone helped to unload his precious cargo.

Half an hour later, the first outraged baby squawked as she got her jab of vaccine.

How well does vaccination protect today’s Third World children against infectious diseases?

The greatest killers of children in developing countries are diarrhoeal disease and acute respiratory (chest) infection, for many of which we lack good vaccines.

Each year, six preventable diseases (tuberculosis, measles, tetanus, whooping cough, diphtheria, and polio) kill 1.5 million to 2 million children. The measles death rates are about 400 times those of the West.

Almost half a million newborn babies in developing countries die each year of tetanus, an infection that doctors in the West hardly ever see in newborn babies.

This form of tetanus follows lack of immunisation of mothers and contamination during childbirth. Local midwives often cut the umbilical cord with a dirty razor blade, a sliver of bamboo or even a blade of tough grass, and then cover the stump with dung or mud.

The tragedies extend beyond the deaths: each year, there are about 100,000 new victims of polio. Malnutrition, measles, and whooping cough disable many others.

The good news is that each year, increased immunisation is saving the lives of about 3 million children. Childhood measles deaths have fallen from 2 million in 1985 to 1.1 million in 1996.

Since it started in 1974, the Expanded Program on Immunisation (EPI) of the World Health Organisation (WHO) and the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) has been very effective.

For the six diseases mentioned (tuberculosis, measles, tetanus, whooping cough, diphtheria, and polio), EPI has raised the immunisation rate of children under one year of age from 5 per cent to about 80 per cent. This 80 per cent represents over 100 million children.

How can underdeveloped countries around the globe get imported heat-sensitive vaccines to children in isolated villages, and keep the vaccines potent?

To keep up the vital ‘cold chain’, some countries use solar-powered refrigerators, but most rely on insulated boxes of ice or carbon dioxide. Heat-sensitive markers turn blue if the temperature rises above 10 degrees Celsius.

During the civil war in El Salvador, guerilla leaders agreed to a cease-fire; for ‘three days of tranquillity’, the only shots fired were of vaccines. When Turkey organised a national immunisation day, civil servants, including the military, helped to immunise children.

Is it worthwhile? Is it cost-effective? Can the world afford such intricate chains to continue the necessary mass campaigns?

To give one child one extra year of life by measles immunisation costs 40 cents; one extra year of life in the USA by treating high blood pressure costs $10,000.

Critics of immunisation and other public-health measures claim that saving the lives of young Third World children is futile if they simply die of other causes soon after. UNICEF accepts the need for other measures as well. To improve child health, UNICEF works towards seven priorities, the acronym of which is GOBIFFF:

Every Third World problem interacts with the others: drought, floods, war, defence spending, poverty, corrupt governments, malnutrition, disposal of sewage and industrial waste, polluted drinking water, illiteracy, high death rates of mothers and children, high birth rates, overpopulation, and environmental damage.

One link is crucial: that between child deaths, birth rate and population growth in developing countries.

It may seem natural to believe that improvement in health care is futile, because it only causes a fall in death rates, and therefore a population explosion. This belief
sounds
plausible, and can too easily become a justification for us in the West to deny aid to the Third World.

But there is strong evidence to the contrary: as they become confident that most of their children will survive, parents gradually have fewer children.

As UNICEF says, there is no conflict between meeting the needs of people and controlling the growth of population.

In 1960, many developing countries had high mortality rates for children under five years (between 200 and 350 deaths per 1000 live births). When these death rates first started to fall, birth rates did not all respond at once. But once child mortality fell below about 150, births also fell.

By now, most Asian and Latin American countries have passed through this initial phase: they are approaching or entering the stage when further falls in child deaths will bring much steeper falls in births.

Maurice Strong, Secretary of the 1992 World Conference on Environment and Health in Rio de Janeiro, summed up: ‘The effort to reduce child illness and malnutrition … is crucial, not only for its own sake, but … to slow population growth and make possible sustainable development in the 21st century and beyond.’

Critics point out that the world population is still rising, and that falling mortality may be associated with (but not the cause of) falling birthrates. Even so, there is convincing evidence that aid and better health care need not cause a population explosion.

The case for wider use of family planning appears overwhelming. Each year, half a million women die from causes related to pregnancy and childbirth. There is also a ripple effect: many infants in developing countries do not survive the early death of their mother.

Four types of pregnancy are especially dangerous for both mother and child: too young, too old, too many, or too close. That is, when the mother is under 18 or over 35 years old, and has already had four children or has had her last child within two years.

UNICEF estimates that if all births could be spaced at least two years apart, this single change would reduce maternal deaths by about 30 per cent, and child deaths by 20 per cent.

The potential for greater use of family planning is enormous.

One simple contraceptive method is full breast-feeding for four to six months, which also protects infants from many infectious diseases.