Trollope excelled in the nuances of familiarity between man and woman. This comes across as another variation on the theme of poor communications; "secret" is not one of the better policies. THE ADVANCE DIRECTIVE THE FIXED PERIOD Dr. William Osler, upon his retirement as head of Medicine at Johns Hopkins Medical School in 1905, delivered a speech, entitled "The Fixed Period," in which he alluded to Trollope's 1881 novel of the same name with comments which, to his astonishment and dismay, brought down a storm of journalistic and popular fury and mockery on his head. Sharing wry and politically incorrect observations which might better have been reserved for private conversation, Osler described two "fixed ideas well known to my friends": the comparative uselessness of men above forty years of age, and the complete uselessness of men over sixty. (Osler was sixty himself at the time.) He went on to describe the plot, which "hinges upon the admirable scheme of a college into which at sixty men retired for a year of contemplation before a peaceful departure by chloroform." The comments were made in an ironic and self-deprecatory mode, and Osler's colleagues congratulated him. Journalists, however, knew a good story when they found one, and Osler, who was leaving the United States to become Regius Professor of Medicine at Oxford, was made miserable by the exaggerations of mischievous newspaper reporters and the outrage of simple souls to whom it was not funny. "Oslerization" entered the language and was listed in some dictionaries as a synonym for euthanasia. [4] [Footnote 4: Bliss, Michael: _William Osler: A Life in Medicine_, Oxford University Press, 1999] And what was the fate of the author of the novel that Osler imperfectly recalled? (The planned technique was the letting of blood from the jugular vein, not chloroform. And it was done at age sixty-eight, not sixty.) Anthony Trollope was sixty-six when he wrote _The Fixed Period_. He described himself as an old man, and indeed he died of a stroke two years later, before publication of the novel in book form. Osler was one of the few who could appreciate its ambiguity and irony. The book sold only 877 copies, and the publishers lost money. [5] [Footnote 5: Terry, R. C., editor: _Oxford Reader's Companion to Trollope_, Oxford University Press, 1999] It's a rather clumsy bit of science fiction, set in 1980, a hundred years ahead of its time. The location, Brittanula, is a small island about two hundred miles from New Zealand. (If the readers could imagine New Zealand, why not Brittanula?) Rapid transit is by steam tricycle. Under the leadership of the aptly named John Neverbend, the Parliament has decreed that each citizen is to be "deposited" in a College in a place called Necropolis at age sixty-seven, there to wait in contemplation until the end of the "Fixed Period" one year later.