Living All Your Life

Abstract

When I came to the United States ten years ago, I expected to work in gerontology, a field in which I had been working for some 20 years. I was delighted to find that gerontology was alive and well, that there are a lot of people involved in it, and that progress is being made in a great many different areas. I should perhaps explain that gerontology is a word which is sometimes corrupted to mean teaching old people to do macrame work. Gerontology is in fact the biological study of the processes of aging. Geriatrics is the branch of medicine which deals with the medical care and health needs of the old, and social gerontology is the branch of sociology which concerns itself with the old. But I found that what was missing in the United States compared with Europe was the awareness of geriatric medicine, which generally was absent from the curricula of medical schools; it is in teaching geriatrics I have been working for the last few years.