A week of rattling around this city of ours, with an extraordinary evening at the Science Museum (already covered), a lunch at the Great Court Restaurant in the British Museum with Susanne Stormer of Novo Nordisk, an evening at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (an Adopt-a-Book event with suggested old books covering such things as scurvy, vaccinations, with marginalia protesting the use of vaccinations inserted by someone from the anti-vaccination movement, or somesuch), a wonderful dinner at Morden & Lea with Elaine, Gaia, Paul and Kate Pocock, and a trip across to Highbury & Islington yesterday to see Anthea and Richard Nicholson – reading The Martian en route, a gift from Jim Salzman earlier in the week.
Still on a medical note, read in The Times on 10 September that a study of more than 700,000 Swedish men between 1958 and 1991 (all of whom had their resting heartbeat measured when they were conscripted for national service) had concluded that those with a low resting heartbeat at age 18 were almost 50% more likely to be convicted later life for assault, murder, kidnapping or rape.
They were also a third more likely to suffer unintentional injures from cases such as traffic accidents.
Given that I have had a very low resting heartbeat for as long as I can remember, the fact that I have had a series of accidents as a cyclist and as a pedestrian is no longer quite so surprising – even if I escaped the duresses of national service, which officially ended here in 1960 (when I would have been 11), with the last conscripts leaving service in 1963.
The researchers speculate that these heightened risks reflected the fact that those committing violent crime – and those who experienced raised levels of accidents – were relatively fearless.
One ethical question raised by the research: should courts accept a low resting heartbeat as a mitigating factor for the commission of serious violence? I hope I don’t have the opportunity it put it to the test …
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