MEDICAL EXAMINATION.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XLIX, Issue 3863, 27 October 1928, Page 4

MEDICAL EXAMINATION.

Advocating periodical submission to medical examination Sir Bruce Brnee-Porter, writing in the London Daily News, says the 20 years’ expectation of life at birth which have been added during the last century are due, in the main, to reduction of mortality in children under the age. of five years. The gain in expectation at 50 years during the same period is so small as to be almost negligible. The only way in which we can increase this expectation is by facing facts and treating the human machine, with the same consideration we now extend to a valuable motor car. The objection that periodic examinations will make a man or lonian neurasthenic is so futile as to be an actual insult to the intelligence of ordinary folk. The only person who would be upset is already a neurasthenic. The diseased organs which cut short the lives of our prominent business men in middle age began many years before the stroke which cut them off in what should have been their prime. “I am not writing merely what I think,” he adds. “I am writing what I know by experience of many, many years, and I would challenge any medical man to face an audience of men of equal standing ill his profession and try to justify the statement that harm rather than good will come from an examination by a commonscnse doctor.”