SUPPOSED TO HAVE BEEN ONE HUNDRED AND SIX YEARS OLD. 143 



but less accessible, histories of the autopsies of persons whose more 

 than centenarian term of years is very well nigh demonstrable 

 have been furnished to us by Dr. Luigi Berruti 1 , in Italy; and in 

 America by a committee of medical men, in the already cited case 

 of Dr. Holyoke. To the case recorded by Dr. Berruti I shall recur ; 

 the case of Dr. Holyoke deserves a few words in this place. Dr. 

 Holyoke, the subject of a memoir drawn up by a committee of 

 medical men, had been himself a physician ; and in the year pre- 

 ceding that in which he died, he twice appeared at public dinners, 

 in his capacity of centenarian, in the town in which he had spent 

 his life. In this town he had settled, at the age of twenty-one, in 

 the year 1749, and from that time up to the time of his death, 

 March 31st, 1829, he scarcely ever left it; and, in point of fact, 

 never was further than fifty miles from it. With such a history as 

 this, it is difficult to be sceptical as to Dr. Holyoke's age ; and as 

 he lived in possession of what are called the comforts of life, his 

 case furnishes an answer to one of the most popular objections to 

 the belief in centenarianism. This objection takes the following 

 form. All the cases of supposed centenarians (such, indeed, are 

 four of those I have instanced) are from the poorer classes, members 

 of which often have a direct interest in making themselves out to 

 be poorer than they really are. And it is exceedingly improbable, 

 supposing such cases to be genuine, that the rich who die from the 

 very same causes (climatic, epidemic, etc.) which the poor die from, 

 should not furnish us with well-authenticated instances of such 

 longevity as we are asked to believe is attained to by ill-clothed, 

 ill-housed, hardly-fed labouring men. To this objection cases such 

 as Dr. Holyoke's furnish a satisfactory reply, especially when we 

 couple with them the consideration that the enormously larger 

 numbers of the poor give Natural Selection an enormously larger 

 chance of finding among them those ' vigorous frames which 

 promise a long life.' 



The details of the five cases I have mentioned I have kept in 

 view whilst putting on record those observed by myself in the case 

 of John Pratt. 



Works on the diseases of age are by no means so numerous 



1 Luigi Berruti, 'Cenni istorici sopra Anastasio Melis di Gastegli in Sardegna, 

 morto in eta di anni 104 nello Spedale Mauriziano di Torino ; con Osservazioni patho- 

 1 .igiche e necroscopiche.' Gaz. Med. Ital. St. Sardi, No. 35, 36, 37. 



