Mediatrics .sx Or the care of the Middle-aged .sx By H. F. Ellis .sx 6 .sx Relaxation in the Middle Years- Hobbies- The Secret of Enjoyment .sx THE belief that a man is as old as he feels is responsible for a great many pulled muscles .sx A wiser principle to follow is that a man , broadly speaking , is as old as he is .sx He may be older .sx He is unlikely to be younger , and if he is , will do well not to show it unless he cares nothing for the good opinion of his contemporaries .sx Far too much sentimental rubbish has been written about the sadness of taking off cricket boots for the last time , putting away tennis rackets and similar dramatic moments .sx The well-balanced man will take his cricket boots off for the last time with at least as much relief as he has experienced when taking them off on a hundred previous occasions .sx He will waste no time in vain regrets as he struggles with the laces , knowing very well that in all probability he will change his mind next May and put the great heavy things on again- and that , if he does not , it will be because he doesn't want to .sx Every psychologist knows that nine out of ten men who consciously do something for the last time have been secretly longing to do just that for at least a couple of years .sx Only the mistaken idea that it will be a wrench has held them back .sx Giving things up is , or should be , one of the great consolations of middle age .sx The man of fifty-plus , waving goodbye from his deck-chair with a resigned " Off you go and enjoy yourselves .sx ~I'm too old for that kind of thing now , " is a living proof of the essential beneficence of the natural processes .sx There is a strong sense of release .sx The annoyance of not being able to do something as well as he used [SIC] can be terminated , the wise man of forty-five suddenly realizes , by not doing it .sx The pity is that he did not realize it at forty .sx This is not to say that middle age is to be a gradual recession from activity of any kind .sx On the contrary it is a time for constantly taking up new pastimes , new interests .sx What must be dropped is those physical leisure-time exercises taken up in youth and now inevitably being performed with diminishing success .sx A man , it has been well said , whose enjoyment consists of constant reminders that he is not as young as he was should take medical advice immediately .sx New activities , of whatever kind , are free from this fatal defect .sx There is no reason why a man of fifty , or even fifty-five , should not take up cricket if he can find a team sufficiently short of men .sx He is unlikely to overstrain himself by trying to do what he never did in his twenties ; nor can he be vexed by loss of form at a game he never played before .sx Indeed he will probably improve for a season or two , and may look forward to reaching his peak at sixty .sx Doctors agree on the therapeutic value of nearly all new skills acquired in late middle age .sx But it must be understood that exercise , as such , has nothing to do with it .sx " Keeping fit " is a sign of immaturity , as is any other spare-time occupation that demands continuity of effort .sx The touchstone , for a man of mature years considering what to take up next , must always be " Shall I be able to drop it again without loss of self-respect ?sx " Whether it is good or bad for him , whether it produces anything useful , whether he will get anywhere with it- these things are beside the point .sx In middle age there are enough things that have to be done with some ulterior motive ; it is folly to take up voluntarily anything that may become a taskmaster .sx Home carpentry , as we have seen in the first of this series of papers , may begin to show itself as early as E.M. =1 , though the main rush of displacement activities is ordinarily delayed until the second period of Middle Middle Age when tennis and dancing are finally dispensed with .sx There is a sure instinct at work here , for carpentry is of all things an occupation that lends itself to being laid down at will , either temporarily or permanently .sx The object under construction is rarely if ever worth completion for itself , nor is some immediate justification for discontinuing the work ( e.g. blunt tenon-saw or shortage of 1 1/2@8 screws ) hard to find .sx One has only to compare the study of History , which so many men almost take up in their fifties , to realize that it is worth while spending a little care over the choice of new interests .sx It is not difficult , exactly , to lay down the Conquest of Peru or Vol. =2 of the Cambridge Mediaeval History once it has been taken up ; but it is not easy to feel altogether happy about never taking it up again .sx 'The trouble is,' as a patient of mine who had had an extraordinary urge to learn something about America once put it , " that when you have spent a lot of money on two great volumes about the Civil War they glare at you from the shelves for months afterwards .sx You might as well be seventeen again , with both your parents at you for never sticking to anything you start .sx " We see , then , that the ideal hobbies and relaxations are those that make no demands , stir up no distressful ambitions and , if they have an end-product , have one that need never be reached .sx At the same time they should not be over simplified .sx There should be an assemblage of apparatus .sx One of the chief factors that age and depress men in middle life , other than bachelors , is the constant spending of money on other people .sx Often , practically all the money expended by a man for his own gratification is provided by his firm through an expense account , which is useful but dull .sx The wise choice of a hobby will enable him from time to time to slip out and buy something- a tool , a box of flies , an exposure meter , a thing for looking at watermarks with- out of his own pocket and for himself alone .sx This gives more pleasure than those who have never tried it would readily believe .sx A further advantage in apparatus hobbies is that the laying out process may take so long that there is no time actually to begin .sx The preliminary arrangement , which is often more absorbing and always less exhausting than the operation itself , may last till bedtime if it is conscientiously done .sx One of the happiest and most well-adjusted fishermen I know spends at least one hour sitting on the bank selecting and tying on a fly , drying and re-greasing his line and so on for every ten minutes his fly is actually on the water- and that of course takes no account of the endless pre-preparatory work he does at home in sorting , retying , gut testing , winding , unwinding and practising knots .sx Painting with oils , for the same reason , is to be preferred to water-colours owing to the multiplicity of tubes , the turps and linseed oil , the scraping and mixing , the additional precautions that must be taken against the possibility of a mess should a start ever be made .sx To be busy but not anxious- that is the thing .sx You have only to compare a woman cutting out material round paper patterns with her husband making plans , with the aid of innumerable maps and Cook's Continental Timetable , for next year's holiday- each , in his and her different ways , indulging in a spare-time relaxation- to realize the importance of choosing a hobby where mistakes do not matter or , better , where the point at which a mistake would matter is hardly ever reached .sx I am sometimes asked by patients of a serious turn of mind , who would regard philately , say , as too frivolous for them , whether I would advise them to take up writing as a leisure time occupation- the writing , that is to say , of some worthwhile book , not of a novel and still less of random articles for money .sx It is not unusual for a man in L.M. =1 or thereabouts to feel this call to perpetuate himself in print , his efforts to perpetuate himself in other ways having reached University age and got too big for their boots , and I do not discourage the urge .sx It is certainly a more wholesome activity for late middle age than " social work , " a host of vice-presidencies , and the long debilitating struggle to become a J.P. But here again there must be care to ensure that the end-product does not become tiresomely assertive .sx As before , it is the assemblage of the materials that counts- the note-taking , the comparison of sources , the visits to the British Museum , the constant putting of slips of paper into large volumes- and a subject must be chosen that will defer the drudgery of actual writing till death .sx Or even later .sx I recently came across a case ( not professionally ; this was before the days of mediatrics ) of a man , a solicitor with no previous knowledge of the subject , who decided on his fiftieth birthday to write a History of Man on a new plan .sx On his death at eighty-four he bequeathed his notes , comparative charts and unreturned library books to his son , then aged fifty-six , with the request that he complete the task by knocking the book together .sx The son occupied twenty-two years very pleasantly in reading through , revising and annotating his father's notes , and it was a grandson , a very well-rounded personality of forty-eight with no leisure-time problems , from whom I heard the story .sx Here is wisdom indeed , when a man can cater not only for his own middle-age and old age relaxations but for those of his descendants as well .sx For we have to remember- and there is much comfort in the thought- that the children who may be a grief and vexation to us now will themselves one day be middle-aged , and will then stand in need of all the comfort and advice that we , as old men , can give them .sx I hope in my next paper to suggest a few simple precautions by which what I may call the pinpricks of middle age may be avoided or at least ameliorated .sx It may seem strange , after the graver problems with which we have already dealt , to concern ourselves with ostensibly minor vexations , but as every mediatrist knows a succession of pinpricks may be anything but a laughing matter .sx It is by no means unheard of for a man of forty-five or over to have a heart attack simply through lack of care in selecting his reading matter .sx Politic Worms .sx By JANE CLAPPERTON .sx ACCORDING to the Worm Runners' Digest ( and let's have no giggling at the back there , please ; this is a serious subject ) experiments are now , right this minute , going forward at Washington University , St. Louis , that are enough to curl your hair .sx It seems that Washington University has a Dr. Edward Ernhart on its staff , and this Dr. Ernhart has made the fairly unattractive discovery that by splitting a worm's head down the middle you get not only , as you might expect , a maladjusted and potentially delinquent worm with a grudge against society in general and Dr. Ernhart in particular but a worm with two heads .sx ( Dr. Ernhart doesn't actually say his patients are maladjusted after treatment but it seems a fair bet .sx ) Furthermore this two-headed worm reacts more rapidly to electric shock-light stimulus than do the obsolescent Mark =1 worms with only one head .sx So there .sx The deeper implications of all this only begin to writhe to the surface when we see that the Daily Telegraph , whence comes this awesome bulletin , describes the Worm Runners' Digest as a publication dealing with " studies started to find out if worms could be taught anything .sx "