LENGTHENING OF LIFE.

Hauraki Plains Gazette, Volume XXXV, Issue 4681, 31 March 1924, Page 3

LENGTHENING OF LIFE.

I in: CANCEROUS AGE. DR. MAYO’S OPINION. Dr. W. J. Mayo and members of the American party of medical men were the guests of the Wellington Rotat e Club la.st week.

.Asked to speak on “Modern Medicine,” Dr. Mayo compromised by speaking on some of the modern features of education. His impression of New Zealand, he said, was of a people at work, with no great wealth, but in dications of great prosperity, which was much better. There were good, honest, comfortable, substantial things to be had. and no great luxury. In that New Zealand differed from America.

In forty years, said Dr. Mayo, medical science and medical research had prolonged the length of human life by twelve years. That is to say, where ■; man’s average lifetime was once forty years it was now fifty-two. Everyone’s life was written either in pencil or in indelible ink. If every man would have the good sense to visit a doctor every six months for a tlwrou-'h overhaul and act upon tinadvice given him, such a man would be writing his life in pencil. H? could erase the bad parts and start afresh. The new education was teaching people to live longer and freer from disease. A great deal had been said about cancer, but it was How known that there was always something that preceded cancer which could be seen on the body or traced by the X-rays, and which an operation could remove. The increase of deaths from cancer simply meant that the people had reached the cancerous age.

Dr. Mayo considered the hospitals in New Zealand were, generally speaking, excellent, and in sume respects superior to those of America. He expressed himself as emphatically against the present system of admitting patients to our hospitals. “Patients," he said, “who are in a position to do so should pay the physician who attends them a fee. if you impoverish the medical profession how arc they to be able to visit outside countries, make researches, and give to people the latest and most up-to-date medical benefits ?” The present system, he thought, was an unfair and absurd way of doing things. The speaker said he was particularly impressed with the Medical School at Dunedin. New Zealand would have to have a population of from three to five million people before another school would be required.