by Anne
Karpf
NY
Times, January 3, 2015
This
thoughtful essay addresses some of our society’s attitudes toward the elderly
and touches on “gernotophobia.”
Excerpt: “…at
the start of the 19th century, the idea of aging as part of the human
condition, with its inevitable limits, increasingly gave way to [our current]
conception of old age as a biomedical problem to which there might be a
scientific solution. What was lost was a sense of the life span, with each
stage having value and meaning.”
Art:
An Old Man and his Grandson, ca. 1490, by Domenico Ghirlandaio.
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