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Introduction: Growing Old in America
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13862 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
12 / 1988 |
1,536 Words |
| Author
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D. Lydia Bronte
D. Lydia Bronte is director of the Third Quarter of Life
Project of the Academy for Educational Development. |
In his Pulitzer Prize-winning book Being Old in America (1975), Dr. Robert Butler sounded a theme that was to become one of the most important issues of the closing years of this century. We are coming to realize that being old, and growing old, affects all of us, whatever our present age. If we are not old now, there is an excellent chance statistically that someday we will be. And long before then we will experience the aging of our parents and grandparents. In our century we have moved from an average life expectancy at birth of 48 in 1900 to one of 74 in 1985. And the hands of the clock are still moving steadily forward; no one can predict when, or if, they will stop.
But along with this gift of added time has come an unexpected development: We do not seem to get physically old at the same chronological ages that we used to. The increase in longevity has been accompanied by a postponement of the aging process that is both mysterious and surprising. As yet, there is no scientific explanation for this phenomenon. Some of the nation's greatest medical experts on aging like Dr. Butler and Dr. John H. Rowe, the new president of Mt. Sinai Hospital in New York, acknowledge that we can see examples of it all around us, but no studies have yet been designed in this country that could begin to provide explanations for such an astonishing turn of events.
To a large degree the limits of old age have always been a movable feast, determined by the prevailing length of life in a society and by its social and cultural traits. In the nineteenth century, 30 was considered the beginning of old age for a woman, moving up to 40 in the early years of our own century. Men got off a little easier, seeing the onset of old age roughly a decade
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