ABSTRACT
It is interesting to reflect on some of the social changes that have taken place since about 1900 and contrast them with conditions today. Then, the number of persons 65 and over were approximately a million and a quarter, now there are over 7½ million. The total numbers in 1900 were not great and of them about two-thirds were married couples and one third spinsters or widows. It must not be thought that the elderly people only came from the richer class since they were very small in numbers, the large majority were quite poor and without any pension. One would perhaps imagine that life expectation at 65 in 1900 was consequently poor, but in point of fact, today for men it is only increased by about a year and for women a little less than three years. Thus there has been some improvement in expectation of life at 65 but bearing in mind all the social and medical advances, for example: pensions, social security, special housing, home helps, free general practitioner, free hospital service, the advent of antibiotics, modern anaesthesia and surgery, blood transfusions and so on - the improvement is not very great. A point can be made very quickly, namely that the vast increase in the number of elderly has arisen because more people are living to the age of 65 not that those at 65 are living very much longer. It also raises the disturbing thought that a lot of very stressing and expensive medicine and surgery could perhaps be more of a luxury than a need. To take one matter as an example; retention of urine and an enlarged prostate gland has always been a common illness of elderly men and today numerous operations are done to relieve the situation. Why didn’t these men die in the early 1900’s, because evidently they did not. It is then probably true that ‘cabbies’ kept a catheter in their hats and used them in the public convenience at times of difficulty - I certainly have been told that this was a common custom.
