Ageing

Abstract

This chapter offers examples of the vicarious experience of aging. This is particularly important insofar as the patient population is growing older and older, and young healthcare providers are repeatedly faced with aging people whose experience are very different—sometimes disturbingly different—from their own. The vignette describes a young physician’s encounter with an old woman suffering from a variety of chronic conditions. The literary texts include a chapter from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s House of Seven Gables, which describes the thoughts and feelings of an aging woman, and a powerful poem about the loneliness and ambiguity of old age, Thomas Hardy’s “I Look into My Glass.”