Word: humanity
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...This may be, Sloan fashion, a continuation of earlier activity, but with a switch from administration to policy, or a new career in public service. It may be that a former avocation can be turned into a vocation. But "make-work" hobbies will not do. The oldster, like the human being of any age, must feel that what he is doing is useful, needed and appreciated. If his former hobby can be thus adapted, so much the better; e.g., an amateur part-time birdwatcher might make a contribution to science as a semiretired professional ornithologist...
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...
...both animal and vegetable kingdoms, is foredoomed to aging changes and ultimate death. But the rate and nature of these changes are far from constant. There are wide variations even among animals of a single species in a state of nature, and naturally they are vastly wider among human beings, living under infinitely more varied conditions, not only social but physical, economic, nutritional and medical. In this fact lies one of the gerontolo- gists' chief hopes: to discover why some men are biologically old at 60, while others like Stagg are still young at a far more advanced chronological...
...layman's idea that because an automobile tire or piston wears out, so eventually must human organs, is only half true. In the youthful, still growing organism, cells divide rapidly, and all the components of the body (except nerve cells) are not only quickly added to, but also constantly replaced at the most intimate molecular level. This process does not stop with maturity; it goes on until death. But there is evidence that the rate of cell and tissue replacement slows down, until- perhaps at different times in dif ferent tissues - it is markedly less than the rate...
...artlessness with which Author del Castillo achieves a child's angle of vision makes his boy-hero Tanguy one of the most endearing and poignant figures in recent fiction. Child of Our Time is both a grim and a grand commentary on the human condition. The first response to this book is elemental-to weep. The second response is to marvel that Michel del Castillo endured what he did, and that, having endured, he could still forgive so much that is eternally unforgivable...