Health: quotes, facts and reflections - Page 8

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Q2025

DriveHealth

Japanese adventurer Yuichiro Miura summited Everest at 70, at 75, and — after four heart operations, the last just months earlier — once more on 23 May 2013, aged 80 years and 223 days: the oldest person ever to stand on the summit.

Miura had been famous half a century earlier for skiing down Everest's South Col with a parachute for a brake. The 2013 climb was no tidy triumph: he was treated for heart arrhythmia that January, and after the summit he was too spent to walk all the way down, descending the final stage by helicopter — a detail he never hid. He kept a promise made to himself at 65, when he decided old age needed a project.

Yuichiro MiuraRead card

Q2026

DriveHealth

Fauja Singh, a farmer who had never raced, began running marathons at around 89 after losing his wife and son. In 2011, at a reported 100, he completed the Toronto Waterfront Marathon — celebrated worldwide as the first centenarian marathoner.

His age was never officially certified — colonial Punjab kept no birth records, so Guinness could not ratify the runs, and 'reported age' is the honest phrase. What is beyond doubt is the transformation: a grieving man in his late eighties who turned sorrow into training runs through London's Ilford, completed multiple marathons past 90, and became a global emblem of late-life vigour. He died in 2025, reportedly 114, still walking miles each day.

Fauja SinghRead card

Q2027

DriveHistory

Kathrine Switzer entered the 1967 Boston Marathon as 'K.V. Switzer' and ran with bib 261. Two miles in, a race official grabbed her, shouting at her to get out; her boyfriend shoulder-blocked him, and she finished the race.

She was the first woman to run Boston with an official number — Bobbi Gibb had run unregistered the year before — and the photographs of official Jock Semple lunging at her became one of sport's defining images. Women were not formally admitted until 1972. Fifty years after that first run, in 2017 and aged 70, Switzer ran Boston again wearing 261, and the organisers retired the number in her honour.

Kathrine SwitzerRead card

Q2028

DriveHistory

Barbara Hillary, a New York nurse who had survived cancer twice, skied the final stretch to the North Pole in 2007 at 75 — and reached the South Pole in 2011 at 79, the first African-American woman on record to stand at both.

Lung cancer surgery in her sixties had cost her about a quarter of her breathing capacity; she took up dog-sledding and photographing polar bears anyway, then decided the poles themselves were the point. She fundraised for years to afford the trips, trained with a personal trainer, and later toured as a speaker telling audiences — especially older women — that the question 'why not?' has fewer good answers than they think. She died in 2019 at 88.

Barbara HillaryRead card

Q2030

DriveHealth

Virginia Apgar trained as a surgeon, but in the 1930s her department chair steered women away from the operating theatre. She turned to anaesthesia — and in 1952 devised the Apgar score, the quick newborn check still used around the world.

The score grades a baby's colour, pulse, reflexes, muscle tone and breathing at one and five minutes old — a sixty-second habit that redirected attention to newborns in their most dangerous hour and helped drive infant mortality down. Apgar became Columbia's first female full professor of medicine, and liked to say that nobody, but nobody, was going to stop breathing on her. The detour she never chose became the career that mattered.

Virginia ApgarRead card

Q2031

DriveHealth

In 1960, in her first month at the US drug agency, Frances Oldham Kelsey was handed a routine approval for a sedative called thalidomide. She found the safety data thin and refused — repeatedly, for over a year, under heavy company pressure.

In late 1961 the evidence arrived from Europe: thalidomide, sold there as a sleeping aid and for morning sickness, was causing severe birth defects. Kelsey's stubbornness had largely spared the United States a catastrophe, though trial samples had circulated. President Kennedy honoured her in 1962, the year Congress toughened drug-approval law. Her lesson holds far beyond medicine: sometimes the bravest available action is a patient, well-documented no.

Frances Oldham KelseyRead card

Q2032

DriveMind

From 1946 in Rio de Janeiro, Nise da Silveira refused to administer lobotomy and electroshock, then standard psychiatry. Sidelined into occupational therapy, she opened painting studios for her patients — and their art astonished the world.

The studios opened in September 1946 inside a national psychiatric centre; by 1952 the work had grown into the Museum of Images of the Unconscious, now holding hundreds of thousands of paintings and sculptures. Carl Jung admired the collection and corresponded with her in the 1950s. Some patients dismissed as unreachable produced work of startling power — evidence, she argued, that the task was never to subdue the mind but to give it a language.

Nise da SilveiraRead card

Q2036

DriveHistory

Shut out of whites-only sports facilities in segregated Georgia, Alice Coachman trained barefoot on dirt roads, jumping over knotted ropes on sticks. At London 1948 she cleared the high-jump bar on her first attempt — the first Black woman to win Olympic gold.

Her winning leap of 1.68 metres set an Olympic record, and King George VI presented the medal. She was the only American woman to take a track-and-field gold at those Games. Historians note the sharper point: her peak years had been lost to the war — the 1940 and 1944 Olympics were cancelled — so the barefoot girl from Albany won her gold at the far end of a decade of waiting.

Alice CoachmanRead card

Q2037

StillnessHistory

Before artificial light, much of Europe slept in two shifts: a 'first sleep' from nightfall, an hour or so of quiet wakefulness, then a 'second sleep' until dawn. The pattern appears in court records, prayer books and letters across languages.

Historian Roger Ekirch pieced the habit together from thousands of references — people used the waking interval to pray, talk, mend, or simply lie thinking in the dark. The rhythm faded in the nineteenth century as gaslight and industrial timetables compressed the night. Evidence suggests it ruled pre-industrial Europe rather than all humanity, so it is best read not as a prescription, but as a reminder: the eight-hour block is a recent invention, and a 3am waking was once nothing to fear.

Segmented sleepRead card

Q2041

StillnessMind

In a small 2020 study, adults in their 60s to 90s took one 15-minute walk a week. Those asked to notice vastness — skies, trees, small wonders — reported growing compassion and gratitude, and even smiled more broadly in their own photographs.

The researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, tracked selfies the walkers took en route: over eight weeks, the awe group gave more of the frame to the scenery and less to themselves — a shrinking of the 'small self' that awe researchers consider the emotion's signature. The comparison group simply walked. Fifty-two people is a modest sample, so read it gently; but the cost of the experiment is one attentive walk, and the walk is pleasant either way.

Awe walk studyRead card

Q2042

StillnessMind

A smartphone study that pinged 1,292 people through their ordinary days found that moments with birds — seen or simply heard — were linked to a lift in mental wellbeing that lasted for hours, including among people living with depression.

The King's College London team collected nearly 27,000 real-time check-ins between 2018 and 2021, catching people in the moment rather than in memory. It is an association, not proof of cause — happier people may also linger where birds are. But the effect outlasted the encounter by hours, and the prescription it hints at costs nothing: a window open at dawn, a slower route through the park, a pause at the sound of song.

Urban Mind studyRead card

Q2043

StillnessMind

In a set of Stanford experiments, people generated ideas while sitting, then while walking. Walking raised creative output by roughly 60 per cent on average — and it worked even on a treadmill facing a blank wall.

The four experiments covered 176 people and tested divergent thinking — the ability to pour out varied, novel uses and analogies. The blank-wall treadmill result matters: it suggests the legs, not the scenery, do much of the lifting. One caution from the same paper: on focused, single-answer puzzles, walkers did slightly worse. So the old writers' habit sorts itself neatly — walk to find the idea, sit to finish it.

Oppezzo & Schwartz, 2014Read card

Q2044

StillnessHistory

The medieval pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela had nearly died out: in 1985, the cathedral recorded about 690 arrivals on foot or bicycle. Four decades later, more than half a million pilgrims complete the Camino in a single year.

The numbers count 'compostelas' — certificates issued to those who complete the final stretch — so the true crowd is larger still. The revival began quietly: a village priest waymarking routes with yellow arrows in the 1980s, then European cultural recognition in 1987. Most modern walkers are not conventionally religious; they come for the oldest reasons anyway — to think, to grieve, to decide something, or simply to move at the speed a human life actually runs.

Camino de SantiagoRead card

Q2045

StillnessMind

Cardiologists once played listeners six styles of music while tracking heart rate, breathing and blood pressure. Fast tempos stirred the body, slow ones settled it — but a randomly inserted two-minute silence relaxed people more than any music at all.

The silence did not merely return listeners to their starting state — measurements dipped below the pre-music baseline, as if the pause borrowed calm from the contrast. The study was small, two dozen people, half of them trained musicians; the journal's own editorial was titled 'The sound of silence is music to the heart'. Composers knew it first: the rest is not the absence of music but part of its grammar.

Bernardi study, 2006Read card

Q2047

StillnessCulture

Japanese has a word for falling asleep in public — 'inemuri', often glossed as 'sleeping while present'. A nap in a meeting or on a train is widely tolerated, and can even be read as proof of working to the point of exhaustion.

The sociologist Brigitte Steger, who has studied Japanese sleep habits for decades, notes that inemuri obeys unwritten rules — who may doze, where, and how visibly depends on status and situation, and the sleeper is expected to snap back the moment they are needed. It is tolerance rather than official policy. The idea unsettles cultures that treat visible rest as weakness; inemuri quietly asks why exhaustion should have to hide.

InemuriRead card

Q2048

StillnessMind

In a forest kindergarten there are no classrooms at all: children aged three to six spend the day among trees in nearly all weather, learning with mud, sticks, rope and their own judgement. The idea is credited to a Danish mother in the early 1950s.

Ella Flatau's habit of minding neighbourhood children in the woods grew into a movement: Germany officially recognised 'Waldkindergärten' in 1993, unlocking state funding, and by recent counts runs well over 1,500 of them. The Scandinavian shorthand is that there is no bad weather, only bad clothes. Advocates point to balance, risk judgement and calm; the quieter lesson is about trust — small children, handed a real forest, mostly rise to it.

Forest kindergartenRead card

Q2056

WonderHistory

Mary Toft of Godalming appeared to deliver rabbit after rabbit in the autumn of 1726, and eminent surgeons — including an anatomist to the king — vouched for the miracle. In London, under scrutiny, the hoax collapsed within weeks.

She confessed on 7 December 1726, after a porter was caught smuggling a rabbit into her lodgings; the 'births' had been staged with animal parts. Careers were wrecked, Hogarth drew a merciless satire, and the press feasted for months. The affair's lasting gift was embarrassment of a productive kind: it sharpened the emerging habit of demanding evidence over eminence — a lesson medicine had to keep relearning.

The Toft affairRead card

Q2097

DriveHealth

Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.

Lorde wrote this in the journals she kept while living with liver cancer, having already survived breast cancer six years earlier. She was refusing a second round of surgery and deciding how to spend the time she had. The line has since been printed on bath products and wellness calendars, which reverses it: she was not recommending a treat. She was arguing that a body the world would rather lose has a political reason to stay alive.

Audre Lorde, A Burst of Light (1988)Read card

Q2102

StillnessHealth

Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick.

Sontag wrote the book while being treated for advanced breast cancer, and kept herself entirely out of it — no diary, no scene at the hospital. Her target was the language around illness: the idea that tuberculosis belonged to the passionate and cancer to the repressed, that a diagnosis says something about the person who received it. Metaphors like that, she argued, add a second illness on top of the first, and this one is made of shame.

Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor (1978)Read card