The view of Kylemore Abbey across the lake is one of the most romantic in Connemara. It was built in 1866 by Mitchell Henry, a London surgeon, who had first visited Kylemore on his honeymoon. His father, a Manchester textile merchant, died a few years later, leaving the fortune that allowed Henry to resign from the Middlesex Hospital and build a castle by the lake. But the Henrys were destined to enjoy Kylemore together for only seven years before Margaret died of Nile fever on an Egyptian holiday. A few hundred yards to the right of the abbey, hidden in trees, is the chapel Mitchell Henry built as a memorial to her, and beside the chapel is the graveyard of the Kylemore nuns.
The Benedictine nuns bought Kylemore in 1920, and the castle became an abbey and later also a school. Forty two nuns are buried there. Each grave is marked by a simple black cross inscribed with a name and the year of birth and death. Kylemore has clearly been an oasis of longevity, and this in the poorest part of Ireland. The average age at death is 81 years. Only one nun died younger than 67, and she was 25. Thirty three nuns lived longer than 75 years and seven died in their 90s.
Twenty seven of the nuns were born in the 19th century, the earliest in 1841, and their average survival was 79 years. The 15 born in the 20th century lived longer, dying on average at 84 years of age.
Of course, nuns are a selected group. They don't enter the convent until they are adults, so infant mortality isn't a factor in their survival and neither is perinatal mortality. But these don't influence survival in Western societies now and haven't for decades, and yet life expectancy for women, currently 80 years, has only just caught up with that of the 19th century nuns. Japanese women today live longer than anybody else, 84 years, and they have just caught up with the 20th century nuns.
What should we make of this? After all, we live in an evidence based age, and numerous studies have shown that the ravages of cerebrovascular and cardiovascular disease, the big killers of old people, can be significantly modified with drugs. As a consequence, it is unusual to find an elderly woman in the medical admission unit who is not taking aspirin, a statin, an ACE inhibitor, and warfarin—at least. And yet these patients are not living as long as a nun born in 1850 who never had her blood pressure taken or her cholesterol measured.
Clearly, we would not all wish to live as Benedictine nuns. Most of us might feel that the advantages of living otherwise would make up for the lost years. But we can't avoid the conclusion that if the polypharmacy of modern doctoring really is our alternative to the rule of St Benedict it seems to be less effective.