Word: conventionals
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...after Easter, and the first crocus shoots have ventured tentatively above the ground at the convent on Good Counsel Hill. This is Minnesota, however; the temperature is 23[degrees]F and the wind chill makes it feel far colder. Yet even though she's wearing only a skirt and sweater, Sister Ada, 91, wants to go outside. She wants to feed the pigs...
Snowdon wasn't out to change the world when he first began visiting the convent of the School Sisters of Notre Dame on Good Counsel Hill in Mankato, Minn. He wasn't even planning to study Alzheimer's disease. Snowdon was desperately trying to find a research project that would secure his position at the University of Minnesota. He was a young assistant professor of epidemiology at the time--a field he'd been introduced to as a young boy who raised chickens to earn money. "I learned a lot about what it takes to stay healthy from taking care...
Chicken studies wouldn't cut it with the Minnesota administration though, so Snowdon was interested when a graduate student, an ex-nun, told him about the aging sisters at her former order, living out their retirement in a convent just two hours away. He was already familiar with the advantages of studying religious groups, whose relatively uniform backgrounds mean fewer variations in lifestyle to confound the data. An order of nuns whose economic status, health care and living conditions were especially uniform would be an excellent starting place for an epidemiological study of the aging process. So he went...
...years before entering the order, that had differed--and memory, even among the mentally competent, is notoriously unreliable. But then, after several months, he stumbled on two olive-green metal file cabinets--the personal records of all the young women who had taken their vows at the Mankato convent. "Everything changed when we discovered the archives," says Snowdon...
...life (most of the sisters were teachers; many had master's degrees). And breaking with academic tradition--but establishing one of his own--Snowdon first presented his conclusions, not through a journal or a conference but directly to the nuns. Recalls Sister Rita Schwalbe, then one of the convent's administrators: "He threw us a thank-you party, and we thought that...