Ticker, Ltd.

A British doctor last week said he had figured out the number of beats in the human heart: about 2,500,000,000 in a lifetime. Dr. Josiah Oldfield, 83, who lives mostly on fruit, attributes his own longevity to not eating meat, drinking or taking strenuous exercise, all of which he thinks shorten life by making the heart beat faster. If Dr. Oldfield's heartbeat is average (100,000 a day), he is already about 500,000,000 beats over his allotment.

Famed Manhattan heart specialist Ernst Boas was moved to a gentlemanly demurrer. "On Dr. Oldfield's theory," he observed, "life could be prolonged to 100 years or so if the heart rate were kept down to 50 beats a minute by putting a patient in bed and keeping him absolutely quiet."

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