A sagacious and venerable correspondent has suggested to the writer that the time is ripe for some kind of a senescent league of national dimensions which should, of course, establish relations with all existing associations of the old but should slowly develop a somewhat elaborate organization of its own, with committees on finance, on the literature of senescence, including its psychology, physiology and hygiene, etc. If such an organization under any name were founded, it should certainly have an organ or journal of its own that should be the medium of correspondence, keeping its members informed to date upon all matters of interest or profit to them, perhaps keeping tab on instances of extreme longevity or unusual conservation of energy, with possibly a junior department eventually for youngsters of fifty. It should concern itself with the phenomena connected with the turning of the tide of life, which so often occurs even in the fourth decade. It would be interesting to know how such an organization would appeal to intelligent old men and women. That it might do great good is hardly to be doubted. CHAPTER V MEDICAL VIEWS AND TREATMENT OF OLD AGE The self-knowledge that doctors give--Insidious approach of many diseases--Medical views of the old age of body and mind (senile dementia)--Charcot--G. M. Humphry--Sir James Crichton-Browne--H. M. Friedman--H. Gilford--H. Oertel--A. S. Warthin--W. Spielmeyer--I. L. Nascher--Sir Dyce Duckworth--Robert Saundby--Arnold Lorand--T. D. Crothers--C. G. Stockton--W. G. Thompson--M. L. Price--G. S. Keith--J. M. Taylor--C. W. Saleeby--C. A. Ewald--Raymond Pearl--Protest against the prepotence of heredity in determining longevity. By an instinct that is very deep and strong most old people shrink from realizing just what their stage of life is and means, although most are ready enough to discuss such symptoms as are forced upon their consciousness. Disguise it as we will, old age is now only too commonly a hateful and even ghastly thing. Even those most garrulous and pessimistic about their infirmities are often prone to an almost fetishistic focalization upon certain symptom-groups of their own to the neglect of others by the same mechanism by which general anxiety may come to a head on a single phobia, which is thus exaggerated, because all the affectivity of their more general state finds an outcrop in some special fear. This mechanism is the same, too, as that by which love may find a vent for itself in some amatory fetish. Few, indeed, are the old men, and perhaps fewer still the old women, who do not seek to seem to others younger than their real physiological age, and all even to their innermost selves are prone to dwell more on what the great deprivator leaves behind than on what he has taken away. Childhood and youth long forward, old age longs backward.