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At a dinner given in honor of his eighty-fifth birthday, I heard Leonard Woolf say that there were two compensations for old age, First, after seventy you become subjectively better: minor ailments vanish and you feel more tonic. Secondly, after eighty you become objectively better: people who once disliked or ignored you now make a fuss of you simply because you are still there; even Queen Victoria, once hissed by the mob, became vastly popular in old age. That was an optimistic view; for a contrary view, take this typical case history given by a leading geriatrician (Alexander Leaf, Scientific American, September, 1973):
Review, 2218 words
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