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Summary
Summary
Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction
A New York Times Bestseller
Longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction
Winner of the WSU AOS Bonner Book Award
Winner of the 2022 At Home With Growing Older Impact Award
As revelatory as Atul Gawande's Being Mortal , physician and award-winning author Louise Aronson's Elderhood is 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."
Author Notes
Louise Aronson, MD, MFA , is a leading geriatrician, educator, and professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), where she directs UCSF Medical Humanities. A graduate of Harvard Medical School, Dr. Aronson has received the Gold Professorship in Humanism in Medicine, the California Homecare Physician of the Year Award, the American Geriatrics Society Clinician of the Year Award, and was named one of Next Avenue's 2019 Influencers in Aging. She is the author of A History of the Present Illness and her articles and stories have appeared in many publications, including the New York Times, the New England Journal of Medicine, the Lancet, and The Atlantic. She lives in San Francisco.
Reviews (2)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Growing old could be much more graceful if doctors would give it some attention, according to this penetrating meditation on geriatrics. UC San Francisco medical professor Aronson (A History of the Present Illness) mines her experience as a geriatrician for insights into the ways society excludes and fails old people. The book's heart is her gripping insider's critique of modern medicine and the invasive, agonizing, and often "futile or harmful" treatments with which it battles disease while ignoring overall well-being. Drawing on intimate, often harrowing case studies of patients and the mistakes made by their doctors (including, painfully, her own missteps), Aronson sleuths out how a callous, clueless medical-industrial complex makes things harder for oldsters in ways small-pill bottles that can't be opened by arthritic hands-and large. (Aronson discovered that a patient seemingly dying of Parkinson's disease was actually suffering from a "drug cascade" of medications prescribed to treat the side effects of other medications.) Less cogent in the sprawling text are her musings on the consolations of "elderhood," which don't convince when placed against the generally grim picture she paints. Still, Aronson's deep empathy, hard-won knowledge, and vivid reportage makes for one of the best accounts around of the medical mistreatment of the old. (June) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
In a youth-obsessed culture, aging fascinates no one, save for those who find themselves keenly aware of the passage of time. Knees creak, skin wrinkles, hearing fades, eyesight dims. As a physician specializing in geriatric medicine, Aronson saw it all and despaired. When treating patients over 60, it seemed, her chosen profession was not always as concerned with healing as it should be and routinely discounted the humanity of seniors. How and why such ageism exists and how it can be combated are the subjects of Aronson's vast and penetrating analysis of the politics and profit motives that undermine health care for elders. Through pertinent anecdotes, probing case histories, and personal revelations, Aronson both inserts herself in the narrative and steps aside to disclose the panoply of forces that must coalesce to provide exemplary care and attention to an increasing aged population. With strong empathy that comes from both a professional understanding of and personal experience with the challenges of aging, Aronson provides an essential guide to how society in general and the health-care industry in particular must recalibrate their approach to providing concerned and competent elder care. Thought provoking and wise, Aronson's memoir-cum-treatise should be required reading for medical professionals and will be of great use for seniors and those who support them.--Carol Haggas Copyright 2019 Booklist
Table of Contents
| Conception | |
| Author's note | p. xiii |
| Birth | |
| 1 Life | p. 3 |
| Childhood | |
| 2 Infant | p. 13 |
| Memories | |
| Lessons | |
| 3 Toddler | p. 24 |
| History | |
| Sick | |
| Assumptions | |
| 4 Child | p. 41 |
| Houses | |
| Resurrection | |
| Confusion | |
| Standards | |
| Other | |
| 5 Tween | p. 63 |
| Normal | |
| Different | |
| 6 Teen | p. 75 |
| Evolution | |
| Perversions | |
| Rejuvenation | |
| Gaps | |
| Choices | |
| Adulthood | |
| 7 Young Adult | p. 105 |
| Trauma | |
| Modern | |
| Indoctrination | |
| Mistakes | |
| Competence | |
| Shame | |
| Bias | |
| 8 Adult | p. 137 |
| Oblivious | |
| Language | |
| Vocation | |
| Distance | |
| Values | |
| Truth | |
| Biology | |
| Advocacy | |
| Outsourced | |
| Zealot | |
| 9 Middle-aged | p. 192 |
| Stages | |
| Help | |
| Prestige | |
| Complexity | |
| Combustion | |
| Sexy | |
| Disillusionment | |
| Priorities | |
| Sympathy | |
| 10 Senior | p. 241 |
| Ages | |
| Pathology | |
| Communication | |
| Freedom | |
| Backstory | |
| Longevity | |
| Childproof | |
| Reclamation | |
| Elderhood | |
| 11 Old | p. 273 |
| Exceptional | |
| Future | |
| Distress | |
| Worth | |
| Beloved | |
| Places | |
| Comfort | |
| Tech | |
| Meaning | |
| Imagination | |
| Bodies | |
| Classification | |
| 12 Elderly | p. 324 |
| Invisibility | |
| Duality | |
| Care | |
| Education | |
| Resilience | |
| Attitude | |
| Design | |
| Health | |
| Perspective | |
| 13 Aged | p. 363 |
| Time | |
| Nature | |
| Human | |
| Consequences | |
| Acceptance | |
| Death | |
| 14 Stories | p. 397 |
| Coda | |
| Opportunity | p. 403 |
| Acknowledgments | p. 405 |
| Notes | p. 407 |
| Bibliography | p. 433 |
| Index | p. 436 |