Curious ideas from Agatha Christie

I'm relistening to the Agatha Christie book Hallowe'en Party, which was written in 1969, and there are a couple recurring elements that I find curious in the perceptions between then and now.

For one thing, even in 1969, it was thought dangerous for people middle-aged and older to exercise at all. People in the books died of heart failure because they worked too much in their garden or climbed a flight of stairs (in one of Christie's books, someone actually committed murder by disabling the elevator, forcing a man to climb stairs and inevitably causing a fatal heart attack).

How different that is from today's realizations!

I remember reading an obituary of the man who first came up with the theory that it was healthier to exercise than to be sedate. Most of the mainstream scienstis called him a heretic and murderer, and this was in the 1970s. This man, whose name I don't recall right now, actually coined the term aerobic to talk about exercise that gets the heart pumping. Predictions were that you've have people dropping dead in the streets all over the place! And now, it is so excepted that we all should exercise that there's a post on exercise in the migraine side of this forum!

The other area that has caught my attention is that in 1969, people had moved from seeing all criminals as evil beings to seeing most criminals as mentally ill people. In fact, they believed that one reason why there was such an increase in crime at the time was that they had emptied the assylums where they had forcibly incarcerated anyone deemed mentally ill (which was often used pretty broadly for any kind of mental illness and not just the more serious ones that needed in-patient care), at least according to Christie's book, and she tended to follow contemporary thought pretty well in her books. (Maybe I should clarify that the comments in the parenthesis are my additions from outside reading and not what I garnered from Christie's books. But the other part about emptying the assylums being the cause of so many crimes clearly is stated numerous times in this particular book, one of her last.)

What I think ironic is that we went from saying that all people who kill are evil to saying that most people who kill must have a mental illness (or even physiological illness, as Christie has experimented with having doctors suggest sometimes -- it's all in the glands). And now, it's gone back to where most of the people who are in our prisons and qualify for mental health treatment are being denied it and stuck with the general majority of prisoners and not in hospitals, where they belong. I don't know if that is the case nation-wide or in other countries, but that is a big problem in California. There have been exposes on that very issue in the paper from time to time, when they study the prison population and discover just how many have serious mental illnesses and shouldn't be with the mainstream population but are.

Anyway, I just thought that it was interesting how outlooks can change so dramatically in such a short period of time. I mean, probably a majority of people here at Ronda's were born by 1969, so you would have seen this shift in your own lifetime!

I remember the general idea of old people being sedate as a way to preserve their strength.