The Health bulletin [serial] - University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

12 The Health Bulletin July, 1927
LIFE ENDED BEFORE TWENTY-FIVE
To the young boy or girl enjoying
youth and abundant health, it seems an
infinity of time before the age of
twenty or thereabouts is achieved.
Time, the years promised to them
seems to stretch out in an endless procession.
If a thought is given to the
problem of old age it is only a passing
one, and it is deferred as something
that may be possible but which is a
long time in the future. Such things
as disease and death, poverty and suffering,
disappointment and lost illusions
are altogether foreign to youth
and health. It may be a wise provision
of nature to guard us from premature
sufCering and disillusionment as long
as possible for the benefit of the race.
But if youth and health could know
and realize fully some of the things, it
would save many a check prematurely
drawn on the Bank of the Future.
While no race, age, sex or clime is
exempt, diseases like typhoid fever and
tuberculosis take the greater part of
their most valuable toll from the ranks
of comparative youth. The terrible
venereal diseases are almost altogether
diseases striking their victims under
thirty. The effects of their ravages
however pursue the victim throughout
life. It is essential to build sound
physical health and good moral character
along with achieving an education
and making money if genuine
satisfying success is to be expected.
Back in student days one of the
closest friends of the writer for the
whole four years in college was a classmate,
a fine upstanding young man of
exemplary habits. He had the finely
chiseled thin lips, high forehead and
piercing eyes of the perpetual student.
A mind always curious and reaching
for more information. He was of frail
physique and seemed to care nothing
about it. He never missed an answer
propounded by a professor in his college
course ; and if he did not make 100
on every examination, it was because
he knew so much about the subject and
wrote so much that time would be
called before he got down to the last
of the questions. After it was all over
and he located in the town of his choice
for the practice of medicine and met
life face to face, he succumbed to a
preventable disease and died within
three months after graduation. Dead
and buried and life ended at the age
of twenty-four. All his hard work and
the knowledge that he had so carefully
and painstakingly acquired went down
before the onslaught of a tiny bacillus.
The knowledge and fine service that
such a man had ready for a wide circle
of people who then as now needed it
so much, seemed wasted.
Twenty-two years have gone by since
we received our diplomas and scattered
to the four quarters of the earth to
practice medicine. Most of the class
are still living. Most of us have done
only mediocre work, like most all other
classes going out from all other colleges,
since the beginning of college
history. This young man was different.
Morally he was the equal and intellectually
the superior of any member
of the outfit. What he might have accomplished
in the profession and in
the world at large during these two
past decades can only be surmised. We
only know that he possessed most of
the requisites for success.
Looking back now through the eyes
of retrospection in a cold, critical, impersonal
view of our regime during the
period it seems that we can see more
ways in which our friend failed in the
main essential thing—preservation of
his health—than would have seemed
possible at the time. He never went inside
a gymnasium during his college
course. He could rarely be induced to
take a walk. He seldom relaxed in any
way. He had no time to read the newspapers.
The theatre knew him not. He
only went to church occasionally and
only then to keep from lying in his
letters to his mother. We have seen
him sit in a crowded congregation with
everybody else under the spell of Lyman
Abbott's incomparable philosophy,
secretly glancing at his watch and
counting the minutes until he could
get back to "Tyson on Practice of
Medicine." He insisted on keeping his
room hot. Night air gave him the sniffles
so he said, and therefore he preferred
to sleep with windows closed.
He took liberties with his stomach that
would have killed a lumber-jack. If
he got interested more than usual in a