Book contents
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Acknowledgements
- List Of Figures And Tables
- Introduction: Geriatrics Today and Yesterday
- 1 The Knowledge of the Ancients: Ancient and Medieval Accounts of Old Age and Their Importance for Early Modern Europe
- 2 Between Elderly Care and Life Extension: Galenic Gerocomies to the mid-Seventeenth Century
- 3 Old Age in the Early Modern University: The Eclecticism of Medical Concepts after 1650
- 4 Old Women: The Marginalization of a Majority
- Conclusion: Proto-Geriatrics between Tradition and Innovation
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
1 - The Knowledge of the Ancients: Ancient and Medieval Accounts of Old Age and Their Importance for Early Modern Europe
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Acknowledgements
- List Of Figures And Tables
- Introduction: Geriatrics Today and Yesterday
- 1 The Knowledge of the Ancients: Ancient and Medieval Accounts of Old Age and Their Importance for Early Modern Europe
- 2 Between Elderly Care and Life Extension: Galenic Gerocomies to the mid-Seventeenth Century
- 3 Old Age in the Early Modern University: The Eclecticism of Medical Concepts after 1650
- 4 Old Women: The Marginalization of a Majority
- Conclusion: Proto-Geriatrics between Tradition and Innovation
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
Summary
In 1720 Johann Friedrich Depré suggested that Hermann Härtel, his doctoral student in Erfurt, undertake a medical dissertation on the analogy between the first and last ages of life. Four years later the doctor and poet laureate Hermann von Westhoven wrote a ‘Wondrous Treatise on the Stinginess of Old Men’. Eight years after that, Jacob Hutter published his dissertation under the provocative vernacular title, ‘That Old Age Is Itself a Disease’. What do these three curious titles have in common besides issuing around the same time and treating the same general topic, old age?
A closer look reveals that all three titles programmatically either quote verbatim or unmistakably allude to familiar judgements (sententiae) from antiquity. Whether it is Plato's equation of childhood and old age, Aristotle's psychopathological characterization of old people as greedy, or Terence's and Seneca's satirical and didactic depiction of the last phase of life as an illness – early modern medicine adopts these popular sayings and topoi to a surprising degree. Medical knowledge about old age from antiquity, and to a lesser extent from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, is integrated as a matter of course into the academic world of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. And this happens in such large measure that the critical question of the period's own independent contribution must automatically be raised.
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- Old Age and Disease in Early Modern Medicine , pp. 11 - 40Publisher: Pickering & ChattoFirst published in: 2014