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.