Health Experts

"You have to get used to old age," my friend . . . admonished me. . . .

"Is that so?" I said.

"Oh, you'll make adjustment. . . . You'll have to. . . ."

"Is that so?" I said.

The skeptical tone was characteristic of Dr. Logan Clendening's newspaper column, but there was more than skepticism in the words.

Dr. Clendening wrote such readable copy that 383 newspapers (combined circulation: 25 million) ran his daily "Diet and Health" column. His book, The Human Body, sold almost 500,000 copies. He scoffed at nostrums for lengthening life: "Nothing anybody does to himself after he is born makes more than a few hours' difference. . . ." So he was all for turning diet over to that "very efficient monitor--the appetite." He once shocked the dry state of Kansas, where he taught medicine, by declaring that what the country needed was a good 5-c- shot of whiskey.

Dr. Clendening had a Pickwickian zest for life.* But bad health and zest do not go together. Last week Health Expert Clendening, 60, convinced that his own health was getting bad, cut his throat. --

Two days later, a second mass-merchandiser of health advice was dead. Dr. Irving S. Cutter, 69, dean emeritus of the Northwestern University Medical School, writer of a "How to Keep Well" column in 50 newspapers (combined circulation: 15 million), died of cancer.

*One particularly zestful moment came in 1939 when he got so mad at the din from a sewer-construction job near his house that he wrecked a WPA drill with an ax, yelling to the workmen: "I say to you, this damned rat-a-tat-tat day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year, must stop!" He was fined $50.

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