Oct 7, 2019
Claudia Cragg (@KGNUClaudia) speaks here with geriatrician and
author, Dr. Louise Aronson (@LouiseAronson) on
her new book, Elderhood, an
essential, empathetic look at a vital but often
disparaged stage of life.
For more than 5,000 years, "old" has been defined as beginning
between the ages of 60 and 70. That means most people alive today
will spend more years in elderhood than in childhood, and many will
be elders for 40 years or more. Yet at the very moment that humans
are living longer than ever before, we've made old age into a
disease, a condition to be dreaded, denigrated, neglected, and
denied.
Reminiscent of Oliver Sacks, noted Harvard-trained geriatrician
Louise Aronson uses stories from her quarter century of caring for
patients, and draws from history, science, literature, popular
culture, and her own life to weave a vision of old age that's
neither nightmare nor utopian fantasy--a vision full of joy,
wonder, frustration, outrage, and hope about aging, medicine, and
humanity itself.
Elderhood is for anyone who is, in the author's own
words, "an aging, i.e., still-breathing human being."