Gerontology

Historical Perspective

The care of aging and injured individuals has a long record in the (pre) history of humankind. Some of the earliest evidence for such care comes from Neanderthal remains in Europe and the Middle East: for example the La Chappelle-aux-Saints fossils in France and those from Shanidar Cave in Iraq. In the case of the individual (“the Old Man”) from La Chappelle-aux-Saints (the type specimen of Homo neandertbalensis), the bones indicate an individual who suffered from arthritis of the jaws, spine, and legs. It is unlikely that such an individual would have been capable of food procurement in a Paleolithic society of the type supposed for Neanderthals. The only way such an individual could survive to a relatively advanced age was through the care of others.

Ralph Solecki excavated the remains of an individual at Shanidar Cave in Iraq who appears to have survived the amputation of his right arm. He had been injured and possibly blinded in the left eye. He also showed a healed injury to the right parietal bone. Although he survived these injuries, he was eventually killed by a slab of falling limestone, while he stood upright. It is not unreasonable, therefore, to assume that there was some sort of care for such older (by Neanderthal standards) individuals who most likely would have been unable to forage for themselves.

In a brief history of gerontology, Joseph Freeman delineates nine periods in the “scientific” study of old age in the past 5,000 years; that is, since the dawn of recorded history. These periods include the Archaic period, which extended from the emergence of writing to the development of early civilizations. His second period lasted from the efflorescence of Mesopotamian, Biblical, and Egyptian cultures to [Page 585]the advent of Minoan and Greek civilizations and includes descriptions of the aged and codes of behavior toward them. The third period, the Greco-Roman, included Hippocrates and Aristotle among the Greeks and Galen and Cicero in Rome. During this period these individuals began to assemble a body of literature pertaining to the treatment of ailments that attend aging. The general belief was that “innate heat” from the heart began to diminish over time, and that this “cooling” led to aging.

During Freeman's Judeo-Arabic period, Moses Maimonides, Arnoldus de Villa Nova, and Avicenna described the differences between young and old and recommended regimens for older people, including less frequent blood-letting only once per year for septuagenarians.

The period of European Emergence brought with it the first book specifically devoted to geriatrics: Gabrielle Zerbi's Gerontocomia, published in 1489. Roger Bacon argued reasonably in De retardants senectutis accedentibus, et de sensibus conservandis, printed in Oxford in 1590 (300 years after Bacon's death) that if people were as zealous in their efforts to conserve health as to restore it, they would lead longer lives free of disease. Bacon recommended the use of magnifying glasses for older people with poor vision shortly before the appearance, in Italy, of vision-correcting eyeglasses.

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