Obituary columns have the secondary purpose, beyond remembrance, of health education. Non-smokers feel instinctively relieved when reading that some sudden middle-aged fatality "liked to address his friends through the miasma from a never-extinguished Gauloise."
Similarly, thinnies must relax when noting the concertinaed chins on a picture of the recently deceased.
But, for those who measure their chances against the recently dead, the current black-edged columns cruelly confuse. Marc-Vivien Foe, a hard-running whippet of a midfielder, drops dead at 28 in an international match, while Sir Denis Thatcher, an evangelical drinker and smoker, lasted six decades longer.
These two obituaries, which seem dramatically to contradict the traditional medical advice on exercise and diet, provide a useful context in which to view the reports -- emerging on the same day that Thatcher and Foe died -- of a superpill for the late middle-aged, predicted to cut sudden death or incapacitation by 80 percent. At a cost of ?0.60 a day to Britain's National Health Service, this tablet will apparently produce a generation of Methuselahs.
But, before we all start booking the Sydney Opera House for our 125th birthday parties, the week's headline bereavements put a stopper in the pill bottle. The Thatcher genes seem to have given unusual resistance to gin and cigarettes, while poor Foe carried somewhere in his bones the code for sudden adult death syndrome, which even a professional footballer's regular strenuous medicals couldn't detect.
So the lesson to be drawn from those deaths is that the planned superpill -- which combines six existing remedies to thin the blood and lower its cholesterol while reducing pressure in the arteries -- will, like most medication, assist some while proving useless to others.
Doing some research recently into the late 1960s, I found in the newspapers of the day an immortality fantasy similar to this week's joy about the superpill. When the first British heart, lung and liver transplants were carried out in rapid succession -- and surgeons posed on clinic steps for cheering crowds, most of them chain-smoking -- there was a similar belief that God or Darwin had been outwitted by medicine.
The 1960s was a hedonistic decade and it was widely suggested in the press that what was on offer was the possibility of a permanent party-pass. Enthusiasts for Woodbines would be fitted with a new set of lungs, while, at some point in middle-age, beer and whisky would be filtered through a fresh liver. Organs would be traded in like cars.
In fact, as we know, the body's built-in tendency to reject foreign tissue means that, 35 years later, transplants remain a perilous and last alternative to the grave. But the dream continued: resurfacing a few years ago in the widely reported possibility of immortality porkers: pigs which would grow replacement body parts for each of us. This too proved more complicated than medical journalism had suggested.
Apart from the fact that it's unlikely to be the advertised panacea, the superpill has potential social side-effects. Doctors and anaesthetists increasingly complain about the tendency of the middle-classes to self-medicate on the basis of newspaper articles. Many patients, while claiming to be taking no medication, are consuming huge daily cocktails of vitamins and homeopathic potions which can then affect conventional treatment. Already, some will be constructing their own superpills at the chemist and on the Internet.
History also shows that advances in one branch of medicine have consequences in another. Bypass surgery and blood-pressure medicines have permitted millions to live long enough to need a hip-replacement or a bed in a dementia ward. The superpill, if it lives up to billing, raises the prospect of hospitals full of veterans with hearts which proudly thump but heads which are entirely ga-ga.
So don't hold your breath to be 100. The hypochondriac and pessimist know that newspaper celebration of the general prescription of the superpill to the over-55s in, say, 2008 would be followed in about 2010 by front-page coverage of suggestions in the British Medical Journal that the six drugs in the Methuselah-capsule are contraindicating and causing people to keel over.
So it's not just the superpill which comes with a shiny sugar coating, but the stories about it as well. Beyond proven medical advice about making sweating and breathlessness your regular friend and fat, salt and tobacco your enemy, the effort to outwit our bodies' hidden plans for us will tend to resemble playing chess against a computer. The opponent is programmed to win. We pray to be a Thatcher and hope we're not a Foe.
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