Old Age and Disease in Early Modern Medicine

---

Daniel Schäfer

The Body, Gender and Culture

Early modern perceptions of old age are dominated by medicine’s inability to treat the diseases associated with growing old. This book takes a thematic look at the historical roots of the debate surrounding this process. Though very much a medically-oriented study, this history also covers material of literary, religious and legal derivation. Schäfer examines over 160 Latin texts from all over Europe, as well as many in the vernacular – including some from America – to challenge medical conceptions of old age during the early modern period.

This is a translated and revised version of Alter und Krankheit in der Frühen Neuzeit: Der ärztliche Blick auf die letzte Lebensphase (Campus, 2004).

Sample pages

• Old Age and Disease: Introduction
• Old Age and Disease: Index

Readership

Early Modern History and the History of Medicine

Contents

Introduction: Geriatrics Today and Yesterday
1 The Knowledge of the Ancients: Ancient and Medieval Accounts of Old Age and Their Importance for Early Modern Europe
2 Between Elderly Care and Life Extension: Galenic Gerocomies to the mid-Seventeenth Century
3 Old Age in the Early Modern University: The Eclecticism of Medical Concepts after 1650
4 Old Women: The Marginalization of a Majority
Conclusion: Proto-Geriatrics between Tradition and Innovation

Reviews

'The strength of this book is in its impressive synthesis of a very broad topic and here it makes a very valuable contribution to the already crowded historiography of old age.'
– Alun Withey, British Journal for the History of Science

Related titles

• Liberating Medicine, 1720–1835
• Monstrous Births and Visual Culture in Sixteenth-Century Germany
• Paracelsus’s Theory of Embodiment: Conception and Gestation in Early Modern Europe
• The History of Old Age in England, 1600–1800

Return to top

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
•