NO “BROKEN” HEARTS

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 838, 5 December 1929, Page 15

NO “BROKEN” HEARTS

: MODERN GIRLS ARE TOO UNEMOTIONAL "Girls of today—the elderly matrons of tomorrow —will never die of broken hearts ” This view was given to the London ‘‘Evening Standard” by an eminent medical authority who was asked to comment on the general question of death through grief resulting from the passing of a near relative. The medical explanation of a broken heart is that great human distress, or emotion, places a strain upon tho system, and a weakness, such as that concerning the heart, is aggravated into a serious illness. Then, if the patient lias no desire to live, no doctor can keep a person alivo. The medical authority, asked if human nature was changing, replied; “Yes —largely through the way life is being lived today. “Women especially are becoming less emotional and less capable of very deep affection. "There is a decided decrease in the number of people nowadays who die of broken hearts. “Elderly married couples of today are bound up in themselves, and the loss of one puts pressure on any weakness in the other, who loses all desire to live, and dies —of a ‘broken’ heart. “The young people of today are leading such superficial lives, and have so many varied interests, so many channels as outlets for emotion, that the death of a dear one simply closes up one channel, and the affection and emotion is diverted into others after the first shock is over. “The death of a young husband is terrible enough to a young wife —but she linds that she has many other interests, and life is not so empty for her as it was for her mother, in consequence. . “It is my* firm belief that the girls of today’, when they become elderly and lose a dear one, will not die of broken hearts. Their lives will be too full of other interests. The shock will pass.”