Word: age
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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With the addition of such refinements as arteriosclerosis (hardening of the arteries) and hypertension (high blood pressure), medicine remained in general agreement with Hippocrates until this century. The disorders so often seen in the elderly and aging were dubbed "degenerative," or "the diseases of old age," with the emphasis on "of," as though they were inseparable. The very word senile, from a Latin root meaning simply "old," took on a derogatory hue, and a doddering oldster was redundantly tagged "a senile...
Exceptions to the Rule. But every age produced a few men who were still great in old age. Plato, who overlapped...
...minds of both medical men and laymen, these productive old men could only be exceptions who proved the rule. Shakespeare reflected the widespread feeling of a hundred generations when he called old age "second childishness, and mere oblivion, sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything...
Modern medicine has reversed the thinking of millenniums on the aging process and the aged. It holds that while aging is inevitable, many of the distressing changes so often seen with it can be palliated, minimized or actually averted. For this reason, Dr. Frederic Zeman, head physician at Manhattan's Home for Aged and Infirm Hebrews, insists on a semantic distinction, doggedly calls these changes "diseases in old age," not "of old age...
Threefold Increase. Along with the development of biochemistry, medicine has sparked the speedup of a new science, gerontology. Properly the study of aging in all living things, and involving social as well as medical sciences, it has focused most sharply on the aging human since 1903, when Elie Metchnikoff suggested in The Nature of Man that "this science may be called gerontology" (from the Greek geron, an old man). In 1909 Internist Ignatz L. Nascher coined the word geriatrics (from geras, old age, and iatreia, cure) for the medical care of the old. Geriatrics has grown as a sub-specialty...