Old age is an academic subject. This unspectacular contradiction of Norberto Bobbio's provocative thesis emerges unequivocally from the normative sources of learned early modern medicine examined here. Their scholarly perspective, however, was largely limited to the creative, literary reception of the medical and moral-philosophical traditions. These traditions were often projected unidirectionally onto the elderly, yet they still managed to have a formative influence on the reality of their (the elderly's) situation. Considering the glut of relevant evidence, the following summary is limited to the most important conclusions and follows the guiding questions formulated at the outset.

1. The Sources

This study is based on an examination of (apart from religious, juristic and philosophical literature) about 170 proto-geriatric monographs from various European countries dating from about 1500 to 1800. Nearly all were written by university-trained physicians. They vary in size from a few to several hundred pages. These writings contain a vast amount of sophisticated information on the theme of old age, so it is safe to assume that they reflect the mainstream of contemporary medical knowledge – knowledge which they helped to spread. Despite significant differences among them, the texts have been grouped under three broad rubrics with the following characteristics:

1. Writings on elderly care (gerocomies) from the end of the fifteenth to the early seventeenth century (cf. section 2.1) are characterized by a strict reception of the Aristotelian-Galenic tradition.