Summary
This chapter presents a sociological portrayal of the elderly who are approaching the second millennium as the first generation socialized to expect old age. Developed are the various temporal influences on the experience of aging, as well as the argument that each cohort will progress through unique aging trajectories. It is predicted that medicine’s role as society’s arbiter over the moral dilemmas of old age will be challenged by an increasingly educated older clientele. Future control over the pre-mature deaths of society’s disadvantaged (producing the contemporary phenomenon of the selective survival to advanced age by minority subgroups) will further increase the proportion of frail old-old and the frequency of such fatal diseases as Alzheimer’s disease. The future will require that we further elaborate the bioethics of health care, and develop models of “good deaths” as well as paradigms of “successful aging.”
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Kearl, M.C. (1985). The Aged as Pioneers in Time: On Temporal Discontinuities, Biographical Closure, and the Medicalization of Old Age. In: Gaitz, C.M., Niederehe, G., Wilson, N.L. (eds) Aging 2000: Our Health Care Destiny. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4612-5062-3_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4612-5062-3_4
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