Frails

Frail woman cries quickly that she is ill and for that very trick lives longer than man. Hygienist Letitia Denny Fairfield of London* has just completed analysis of 900 consecutive cases of illness among London school teachers. She finds that the women were absent for illness twice as long as were the men of the same occupational groups. The difference was not due to maladies peculiar to women, but included those such as common colds, influenza, lung infections. Nervous diseases incapacitated women three times as much as men. But rheumatism and diseases of the joints affected both sexes in almost equal numbers. Against these facts is the strange one that the death rate for London men school teachers is twice as high as for the women. "In some paradoxical way women save themselves from death by becoming ill," Hygienist Fairfield decides. Instead of stubbornly working "until they drop," they get early and efficacious medical attention.

*Miss Fairneld is famed in England for being a Commander of the Order of the British Empire, a doctor of medicine, a bachelor of surgery, a barrister of the Middle Temple (law) a diplomat in public health.