The Century Club: When lightning strikes
The world’s oldest man, Japan's Yasutaro Koide, recently passed away at age 112. But like Frances Newman, the number of death-defiers amongst us is growing
Frances Newman truly is a death-defier. Struck by lightning at the age of two, she survived to talk about it and still proudly displays a scorched, disfigured child’s shoe that she wore on that day. Later, at the age of 17, she was rushed to John Radcliffe, a nearby hospital in Oxford in the United Kingdom, with severe Osteomyelitis, a debilitating bone infection. “I could not walk, I was finished,” remembers Frances. The medical staff expected she would never walk out again.
In both cases, Frances survived: once through luck and once through the wonders of antibiotics, which had only just been introduced. But it is not this what makes Frances a death-defier. Average life expectancy now extends far beyond what thousands of generations before us experienced “naturally.” What humanity managed to achieve in the 20th century was to add an extra 30 years on average to the life of individuals in most parts of the world to, in effect, hand death a rain check.
In this sense, we are all death-defiers. Frances, 102-years of age at the time of writing in late, is merely at the sharp end of this advance. She is one of the 343,000 centenarians worldwide. By, this figure is likely to increase ten-fold to 3.2 million. In fact, this is becoming the fastest-growing demographic in much of the developed world thanks to the aging baby-boomer generation.
In this latest Century Club video of people sharing extraordinary insights into their “ordinary lives,” Frances describes her growing up during the time of the Zeppelin raids on London as well as the idyllic years of walking, reading and dancing as a young woman in Oxford.
