Evening Republican, Volume 21, Number 181, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 10 August 1918 — URGES STICKING TO BUSINESS [ARTICLE]

URGES STICKING TO BUSINESS

Physician Asserts That Too Early Retirement of Successful Business Men I* a Mistaken Policy. To old men who are thinking of retiring from active business Dr. William J. Robinson, editor of the Medical Critic and Guide, gives the celebrated advice once tendered by Punch “to young people about to marry,” namely, “Don't!” The counsel often given to those of advancing years, even by physicians, to take things “easier,” to give up this and give,up that —in short, to lead a dull, empty, vegetable existence, is unqualifiedly bad. Doctor Robinson thinks, although, of course, there are exceptions and special cases. He writes: “An old man with a very high blood pressure—i. e., ’high for his age—should not engage in business which is likely to cause him great excitement and throw him in fits of anger; and a man who is showing symptoms of senile dementia should not be intrusted with important affairs; but, generally speaking, there is no reason why a man should give up hi* work or narrow the circle of his interests; merely because he has celebrated the seventieth or eightieth anniversary of his birthday. «The. general condition of the man, his fitness, should be the criterion, and not his age in years. We all know that some people at sixty are actually older than some are at seventy or eighty. “The advice to old men to retire has sometimes, if followed, very disastrous consequences. A man of seventy or eighty is attending to his profession or business in a satisfactory manner, and he feels well. Suddenly he decides or is advised to retire and take things ‘easy’ for the rest of his days. He does—-and in a few weeks or months that man is a physical or mental wreck and ruin. As long as he kept up his mental interests he was all right. A sudden change, a sudden vacuum, I might say, perhaps the pernicious subconscious feeling that now it is all over for him—all that contributed to the disaster And it is not the physical change so much as the mental that is the important factor. I, for one, am sure that mental activity, mental Interest, has a life-prolonging influence, because mental activity stimulates toany, if not all, of our vital processes. It'is not • mental work that ever kills; it is worry that does it, and even its baneful influence has been greatly exaggerated. We know of octogenarians whose lives have been one round of trouble.”