(Louise Hall and Sarah Price)
The faded pages in an innocuous-looking little brown book claim that the secret to living a long healthy life lies in a mix of traditional herbal remedies and fresh air.
Forgotten for almost a century before it was rediscovered in an English attic, the fascinating but sometimes bizarre wisdom of an earlier generation who relied on natural therapies for their well-being is now available on http://www.howtolive100years.com.
And if its previous owner, a woman who beat breast cancer and lived to 103 is any indication, the commonsense approach to treating everything from earache to eczema in How To Live 100 Years may indeed help us live longer.
Forgotten for almost a century before it was rediscovered in an English attic, the fascinating but sometimes bizarre wisdom of an earlier generation who relied on natural therapies for their well-being is now available on http://www.howtolive100years.com.
And if its previous owner, a woman who beat breast cancer and lived to 103 is any indication, the commonsense approach to treating everything from earache to eczema in How To Live 100 Years may indeed help us live longer.
British nutritional therapist Elizabeth Harfleet found the pocket-sized book among the personal belongings of her late great-aunt Lillie Hogg.
Lillie Hogg swore by the 90-page manual of herbal remedies and treatments compiled by Yorkshire herbalist James Robinson that sold early last century for a shilling.
"As I began to thumb through the yellowed pages I quickly realised I was holding a piece of history and it was all the more remarkable because my great-aunt Lillie had obviously proved that living by this book had worked," Ms Harfleet, 46, said.
Lillie Hogg was born in 1870 and never married, travelled or drank alcohol and outlived all her siblings by enjoying a simple life in Yorkshire. In middle age she overcame breast cancer when knowledge and treatment of the disease was in its infancy.
She followed the advice, such as pepper for earache, plantain leaves for toothache and horseradish mixed with gin for premenstrual tension and passed the remedies down to Ms Harfleet's father. "When I had mumps, he put boiled onions on my neck," Ms Harfleet said.
While Lillie was living proof of the health benefits of herbal medicine, there are growing numbers of "super-centenarians" aged 110 or older, and more "semi-super-centenarians", aged 105 to 109, in Australia.
Census figures show declining fertility rates and improved survival rates of older people mean centenarians have become the fastest-growing age group in the nation.
Over the past 25 years, centenarian numbers have grown by 8.5 per cent a year. At last count, 3154 Australians were aged 100 or older - one-third of them from NSW, but this figure is forecast to grow to 12,000 by 2020 and 50,000 by 2050, a study published last month in the Medical Journal Of Australia shows.
At 101, Lyster Holland is too busy to give up living. "I haven't had time to die yet," Mr Holland said from his home in Young, in the state's Central West. "I've always been busy."
Mr Holland is a father of six, including a daughter whom he and his wife Myrtle, who died 18 months ago, adopted as a baby after her mother was badly injured in a car accident. He has 19 grandchildren and 33 great-grandchlidren.
Mr Holland has never smoked and rarely drinks alcohol.
"I've had a good life, had a lot of experiences," he said. "My ambition was to make people happy, and that's what I did."
(Source: The Sun-Herald)
