Elderhood: Redefining Aging, Transforming Medicine, Reimagining Life on Zoom | Mechanics' Institute

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Elderhood: Redefining Aging, Transforming Medicine, Reimagining Life on Zoom
with author Louise Aronson

This meeting will take place over Zoom. To receive an invitation to the meeting, please sign up using the Eventbrite link below. You will receive an invitation and a link to Zoom two days before the event.

If you have not received a Zoom link by the day before the event, please contact us at [email protected]

 

Pulitzer Prize Finalist and 2020 Northern California Book Awards Finalist!

“Exquisitely written . . . [Aronson] advocates a new paradigm: a re-balancing act in which technology has a role but the focus returns to care. Unlike the high-tech, algorithmic march of modern medicine, her idea of truly 'personalized medicine' incorporates the patient's past experiences and current expectations. This integrative, humanistic model of geriatrics is rare. One can only hope its practices are adopted swiftly.” – Nature

“[A] penetrating meditation on geriatrics . . . Aronson's deep empathy, hard-won knowledge, and vivid reportage makes for one of the best accounts around of the medical mistreatment of the old.” – Publishers Weekly, starred review

“An examination of aging and the human condition encompassing poignant stories and the viewpoints of medical experts, writers, historians, and scientists . . . Empathetic, probing, and often emotionally moving narratives on appreciating the power and the pain of aging.” – Kirkus, starred review

As revelatory as Atul Gawande's Being Mortal, physician and award-winning author Louise Aronson's Elderhood is an essential, empathetic look at a vital but often disparaged stage of life.

For more than 5,000 years, "old" has been defined as beginning between the ages of 60 and 70. That means most people alive today will spend more years in elderhood than in childhood, and many will be elders for 40 years or more. Yet at the very moment that humans are living longer than ever before, we've made old age into a disease, a condition to be dreaded, denigrated, neglected, and denied.

Reminiscent of Oliver Sacks, noted Harvard-trained geriatrician Louise Aronson uses stories from her quarter century of caring for patients, and draws from history, science, literature, popular culture, and her own life to weave a vision of old age that's neither nightmare nor utopian fantasy--a vision full of joy, wonder, frustration, outrage, and hope about aging, medicine, and humanity itself.

Elderhood is for anyone who is, in the author's own words, "an aging, i.e., still-breathing human being."

Morning Edition, Politico, Kaiser Health News, Tech Nation and the New Yorker.

Louise Aronson, MD MFA, is a leading geriatrician, writer, eduator, professor of medicine at UCSF and the author of the New York Times bestseller and Pulitzer Prize finalist Elderhood: Redefining Aging, Transforming Medicine, and Reimagining Life. A graduate of Harvard Medical School, Dr. Aronson has received the gold Professorship in Humanism in Medicine, the California Homecare Physician of the Year award, and the American Geriatrics Society Clinician-Teacher of the Year award. Her writing credits include the New York Times, Atlantic, Washington Post, Discover, Vox, JAMA, Lancet, and the New England Journal of Medicine, and she has been featured on NPR's Fresh Air, TODAY, CBS This Morning, NBC News, Morning Edition, Politico, Kaiser Health News, Tech Nation, and the New Yorker.

 

 

 

 

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