mediatrics . or the care of the middle-aged . by H F Ellis . 6 . relaxation in the middle years - hobbies - the secret of enjoyment . the belief that a man is as old as he feels is responsible for a great many pulled muscles . a wiser principle to follow is that a man , broadly speaking , is as old as he is . he may be older . he is unlikely to be younger , and if he is , will do well not to show it unless he cares nothing for the good opinion of his contemporaries . far too much sentimental rubbish has been written about the sadness of taking off cricket boots for the last time , putting away tennis rackets and similar dramatic moments . the well-balanced man will take his cricket boots off for the last time with at least as much relief as he has experienced when taking them off on a hundred previous occasions . he will waste no time in vain regrets as he struggles with the laces , knowing very well that in all probability he will change his mind next May and put the great heavy things on again - and that , if he does not , it will be because he does n&apos;t want to . every psychologist knows that nine out of ten men who consciously do something for the last time have been secretly longing to do just that for at least a couple of years . only the mistaken idea that it will be a wrench has held them back . giving things up is , or should be , one of the great consolations of middle age . the man of fifty-plus , waving goodbye from his deck-chair with a resigned off you go and enjoy yourselves . I &apos;m too old for that kind of thing now , is a living proof of the essential beneficence of the natural processes . there is a strong sense of release . the annoyance of not being able to do something as well as he used can be terminated , the wise man of forty-five suddenly realizes , by not doing it . the pity is that he did not realize it at forty . this is not to say that middle age is to be a gradual recession from activity of any kind . on the contrary it is a time for constantly taking up new pastimes , new interests . what must be dropped is those physical leisure-time exercises taken up in youth and now inevitably being performed with diminishing success . a man , it has been well said , whose enjoyment consists of constant reminders that he is not as young as he was should take medical advice immediately . new activities , of whatever kind , are free from this fatal defect . there is no reason why a man of fifty , or even fifty-five , should not take up cricket if he can find a team sufficiently short of men . he is unlikely to overstrain himself by trying to do what he never did in his twenties ; nor can he be vexed by loss of form at a game he never played before . indeed he will probably improve for a season or two , and may look forward to reaching his peak at sixty . doctors agree on the therapeutic value of nearly all new skills acquired in late middle age . but it must be understood that exercise , as such , has nothing to do with it . keeping fit is a sign of immaturity , as is any other spare-time occupation that demands continuity of effort . the touchstone , for a man of mature years considering what to take up next , must always be shall I be able to drop it again without loss of self-respect ? whether it is good or bad for him , whether it produces anything useful , whether he will get anywhere with it - these things are beside the point . in middle age there are enough things that have to be done with some ulterior motive ; it is folly to take up voluntarily anything that may become a taskmaster . home carpentry , as we have seen in the first of this series of papers , may begin to show itself as early as E.M 1 , though the main rush of displacement activities is ordinarily delayed until the second period of middle middle age when tennis and dancing are finally dispensed with . there is a sure instinct at work here , for carpentry is of all things an occupation that lends itself to being laid down at will , either temporarily or permanently . the object under construction is rarely if ever worth completion for itself , nor is some immediate justification for discontinuing the work ( e.g blunt tenon-saw or shortage of 1 1/2 &amp;prime;&amp;prime; screws ) hard to find . one has only to compare the study of history , which so many men almost take up in their fifties , to realize that it is worth while spending a little care over the choice of new interests . it is not difficult , exactly , to lay down the conquest of Peru or Vol 2 of the Cambridge mediaeval history once it has been taken up ; but it is not easy to feel altogether happy about never taking it up again . the trouble is , as a patient of mine who had had an extraordinary urge to learn something about America once put it , that when you have spent a lot of money on two great volumes about the civil war they glare at you from the shelves for months afterwards . you might as well be seventeen again , with both your parents at you for never sticking to anything you start . we see , then , that the ideal hobbies and relaxations are those that make no demands , stir up no distressful ambitions and , if they have an end-product , have one that need never be reached . at the same time they should not be over simplified . there should be an assemblage of apparatus . one of the chief factors that age and depress men in middle life , other than bachelors , is the constant spending of money on other people . often , practically all the money expended by a man for his own gratification is provided by his firm through an expense account , which is useful but dull . the wise choice of a hobby will enable him from time to time to slip out and buy something - a tool , a box of flies , an exposure meter , a thing for looking at watermarks with - out of his own pocket and for himself alone . this gives more pleasure than those who have never tried it would readily believe . a further advantage in apparatus hobbies is that the laying out process may take so long that there is no time actually to begin . the preliminary arrangement , which is often more absorbing and always less exhausting than the operation itself , may last till bedtime if it is conscientiously done . one of the happiest and most well-adjusted fishermen I know spends at least one hour sitting on the bank selecting and tying on a fly , drying and re-greasing his line and so on for every ten minutes his fly is actually on the water - and that of course takes no account of the endless pre-preparatory work he does at home in sorting , retying , gut testing , winding , unwinding and practising knots . painting with oils , for the same reason , is to be preferred to water-colours owing to the multiplicity of tubes , the turps and linseed oil , the scraping and mixing , the additional precautions that must be taken against the possibility of a mess should a start ever be made . to be busy but not anxious - that is the thing . you have only to compare a woman cutting out material round paper patterns with her husband making plans , with the aid of innumerable maps and Cook &apos;s continental timetable , for next year &apos;s holiday - each , in his and her different ways , indulging in a spare-time relaxation - to realize the importance of choosing a hobby where mistakes do not matter or , better , where the point at which a mistake would matter is hardly ever reached . I am sometimes asked by patients of a serious turn of mind , who would regard philately , say , as too frivolous for them , whether I would advise them to take up writing as a leisure time occupation - the writing , that is to say , of some worthwhile book , not of a novel and still less of random articles for money . it is not unusual for a man in L.M 1 or thereabouts to feel this call to perpetuate himself in print , his efforts to perpetuate himself in other ways having reached University age and got too big for their boots , and I do not discourage the urge . it is certainly a more wholesome activity for late middle age than social work , a host of vice-presidencies , and the long debilitating struggle to become a J.P . but here again there must be care to ensure that the end-product does not become tiresomely assertive . as before , it is the assemblage of the materials that counts - the note-taking , the comparison of sources , the visits to the British Museum , the constant putting of slips of paper into large volumes - and a subject must be chosen that will defer the drudgery of actual writing till death . or even later . I recently came across a case ( not professionally ; this was before the days of mediatrics ) of a man , a solicitor with no previous knowledge of the subject , who decided on his fiftieth birthday to write a history of man on a new plan . on his death at eighty-four he bequeathed his notes , comparative charts and unreturned library books to his son , then aged fifty-six , with the request that he complete the task by knocking the book together . the son occupied twenty-two years very pleasantly in reading through , revising and annotating his father &apos;s notes , and it was a grandson , a very well-rounded personality of forty-eight with no leisure-time problems , from whom I heard the story . here is wisdom indeed , when a man can cater not only for his own middle-age and old age relaxations but for those of his descendants as well . for we have to remember - and there is much comfort in the thought - that the children who may be a grief and vexation to us now will themselves one day be middle-aged , and will then stand in need of all the comfort and advice that we , as old men , can give them . I hope in my next paper to suggest a few simple precautions by which what I may call the pinpricks of middle age may be avoided or at least ameliorated . it may seem strange , after the graver problems with which we have already dealt , to concern ourselves with ostensibly minor vexations , but as every mediatrist knows a succession of pinpricks may be anything but a laughing matter . it is by no means unheard of for a man of forty-five or over to have a heart attack simply through lack of care in selecting his reading matter . politic worms . by Jane Clapperton . according to the worm runners &apos; digest ( and let &apos;s have no giggling at the back there , please ; this is a serious subject ) experiments are now , right this minute , going forward at Washington University , St Louis , that are enough to curl your hair . it seems that Washington University has a Dr Edward Ernhart on its staff , and this Dr Ernhart has made the fairly unattractive discovery that by splitting a worm &apos;s head down the middle you get not only , as you might expect , a maladjusted and potentially delinquent worm with a grudge against society in general and Dr Ernhart in particular but a worm with two heads . ( Dr Ernhart does n&apos;t actually say his patients are maladjusted after treatment but it seems a fair bet . ) furthermore this two-headed worm reacts more rapidly to electric shock-light stimulus than do the obsolescent mark 1 worms with only one head . so there . the deeper implications of all this only begin to writhe to the surface when we see that the daily telegraph , whence comes this awesome bulletin , describes the worm runners &apos; digest as a publication dealing with studies started to find out if worms could be taught anything . 