The photo above is of John D. Rockefeller. The founder of the Standard Oil Company, he is considered by many historians to be the single richest human being who ever lived. Mr. Rockefeller was simultaneously a ruthless businessman and a very generous philanthropist, and is thus remembered as both a villain and a hero of American history. But for the purposes of this article, what’s relevant is that Mr. Rockefeller lived to the age of 97, and remained mentally sharp and physically active right up until almost the very end of his long life.
I’ve mentioned in a prior blog post that I’m a history buff and that I sometimes wonder whether we can learn anything from the past about better health habits. So it was that while reading a biography of Mr. Rockefeller a few years ago, I was struck by something – John D. Rockefeller was a devotee of circadian medicine, nearly a century before the field was even invented.
I’ll come back to John D. Rockefeller in a moment, but first: what is Circadian medicine?
