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Show people who retire from active life at some arbitrarily decided decid-ed age and are gone within a few months or a few years. The great progress made on the development of medicines and in surgery, and in the general standards of medical care, are doing wonders ffi the ills ,and problems of the physical being. The big thing now is to encourage and enable en-able the elderly to perform valuable rewarding work of which the majority of them are capable. Old age may be preventable in future years Doddering old age that ancient bane of humanity is largely preeventable. And senility sen-ility may some day become a thing of the past. Those encouraging words come from Dr. Edward Bortz, a past president of the American Ameri-can Medical Association and the American Geriatrics Society. So-ciety. Today's children, and a good proportion of their parents, par-ents, can probably expect to live 80 to 90 years 10 years more than the present average. aver-age. Soon a century , of living can be expected. V But years alone are but a bit of the story. The emphasis, Dr. Bortz stresses, is on "living" "liv-ing" as contrasted with existing. ex-isting. Growing old involves the mind as well as the body. This country's transition from a rural to an industrialized nation has created profound changes in our way of life, especially es-pecially for the elderly. The generations live in separate, rather , than the same, homes. Worst of all has been the exclusion ex-clusion of older people from meaningful work. And man's essential function is to work. When stripped of this he sometimes some-times moulders. Almost all of us know apparently healthy |