Senescence: The Last Half of Life
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| Senescence: The Last Half of Life |
From introduction
There are few specialists in gerontology even among physicians. Its physiological and pathological aspects have been treated not only for plants and animals but for man, and this has been done best by men in their prime.
For its more subjective and psychological aspects, however, we shall always be dependent chiefly upon those who are undergoing its manifold metamorphoses and therefore lack the detachment that alone can give us a true and broad perspective.
Again, youth is an exhilarating, age a depressing theme. Both have their zest but they are as unlike as the mood of morning and evening, spring and autumn.
Despite the interest that has impelled the preparation of these chapters there is, thus, a unique relief that they are done and that the mind can turn away from the contemplation of the terminal stage of life. An old man devoting himself for many months to the study of senectitude and death has a certain pathetic aspect, even to those nearest him, so that his very household brightens as his task draws toward its close.
It was begun, not chiefly for others, even for other old people, but because the author felt impelled upon entering this new stage of life and upon retirement from active duties, to make a self-survey, to face reality, to understand more clearly what age was and meant for himself, and to be rightly oriented in the post-graduate course of life into which he had been entered.
The decision to publish came later in the hope that his text might prove helpful, not only to fellow students in the same curriculum but to those just passing middle life, for the phenomena of age begin in the early forties, when all should think of preparing for old age.
first, in a lighter and more personal vein and by way of further introduction, let me state that after six years of post-graduate study abroad, two of teaching at Harvard, and eight of professoring at the Johns Hopkins, I found myself at the head of a new university, from which latter post, after thirty-one years of service,I have just retired and become a pensioner. In this last left position I had to do creative educational work and shape new policies. I was given unusual freedom and threw my heart and soul into the work, making it more or less of a new departure.
I nursed the infancy of the institution with almost maternal solicitude, saw it through various diseases incident to the early stages of its development, and steered it through several crises that taxed my physical and mental powers to their uttermost. In its service I had to do, as best I could, many things for which I was little adapted by training or talent and some of which were personally distasteful.
But even to these I had given myself with loyalty and occasionally with abandon, as my "bit" in life, remembering that while men come and go, good institutions should, like Tennyson's brook, "go on forever."
There is always considerable publicity in such work and one has always to consider, in every measure, its effects upon the controlling board in whom the prime responsibility for its welfare is vested, the public,