The Art of Aging
Page 26
For some thirty-five years, the personal and moral philosophies of Vittorio Ferrero have been my constant guide, and the model on which I have based my view of the world and all it has come to mean. We have been more than friends and even more than brothers. Our patterns of thinking have become interwoven one into the other, though my small gifts to him pale in comparison to all he has given me.
Accelerated in the last few years, this book—like its author—has been in progressive stages of development for three quarters of a century. Some of the ideas and thoughts described here were evolving decades before I had any awareness that they were in the process of formation. So many men and women have contributed to every phase of the evolution, that I can thank only those whom I have sought out during the actual writing. Each of them has been forthcoming, frank, and helpful beyond my ability to describe in the small space of a few allotted pages; each of them has made me look in directions and explore issues I might not have considered without the suggestions they made and the questions they raised.
For me, the voice of my Yale colleague, Leo Cooney, has been the voice of authority and reason, not only in geriatrics and gerontology, but in the entire spectrum of caring for the human body and spirit. He has been generous with his time, his counsel, and his good nature. Our hours together have provided insights that affect every chapter that appears between these covers.
Jason Pontin, first as the editor of Acumen: Journal of Sciences and later of MIT’s Technology Review, suggested that I write the essays later incorporated into chapters 7 and 8. As though intuiting that it was time for me to begin marshaling my voluminous though still scattered notions about aging, he not only put my feet to the fire, but actually thought up a notion that eventually found its way into the subtitle of my book. And so, he has been both a human catalyst and a bit of parent as well, to the finished product.
Books of this kind are virtually impossible to write without the help of a skilled research assistant. I have been blessed with the appearance in my life of a young woman on the brink of her own brilliant academic career, who has been unstinting in her devotion to this project and every other one in which I’ve been engaged in recent years. Christiana Peppard’s instincts, her industry, and her intellect have been instrumental in so many ways as the work progressed that my debt to her is exceeded in magnitude only by the joy it has given me to know her.
Not a single one of those friends whom I approached hesitated for a moment in an enthusiastic willingness to discuss issues of aging, to read and comment on sections or all of the manuscript, or to help guide my thinking into forms that I might articulate to a general reader. Because I admire each of them so much, I am proud to put their names in these pages. They are Cornelia and Michael Bessie, Sam Litzinger, John Mascotte, Dorcas MacClintock, Robert Massey, Patricia Papper, James Ponet, Kathleen Queen Peterson, and Lyn Traverse.
And so, there they are—in a reversal of the usual order. I am grateful for all they have done, but even more so because the writing of this book has brought me closer to each of them.
New Haven, 2007
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
SHERWIN B. NULAND is Clinical Professor of Surgery at the Yale School of Medicine. Dr. Nuland is the author of How We Die, which won the National Book Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the Book Critics Circle Award, as well as Lost in America, The Doctors’ Plague, Leonardo da Vinci, and How We Live. He lives in Connecticut.
ALSO BY SHERWIN B. NULAND
How We Die
How We Live
Doctors: The Biography of Medicine
The Mysteries Within
Leonardo da Vinci
Lost in America
The Doctors’ Plague
Maimonides
Copyright © 2007 by Sherwin B. Nuland
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
RANDOM HOUSE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Portions of Chapter 7 were originally published in different form as “Do You Want to Live Forever?” in Technology Review, 108 (2) 36–45, February 2005; portions of Chapter 8 were originally published in different form as “How to Grow Old: A Physician’s Prescription” in Acumen: Journal of Sciences, 1 (11) 48–57, August/September 2003 and “Pumping Iron” in The American Scholar, the Journal of the Phi Beta Kappa Society, 68 (3) 121–124, Summer 1999.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:
MIRIAM GABLER: Essay entitled “Long Overdue” by Miriam Gabler, copyright © 2003 by Miriam Gabler. First published in Ozarks Senior Living, Springfield, MO. Reprinted by permission.
RANDOM HOUSE, INC.: “Grace” from Absolute Trust in the Goodness of the Earth: New Poems by Alice Walker, copyright © 2002 by Alice Walker. Reprinted by permission of Random House, Inc.
SIMON & SCHUSTER ADULT PUBLISHING GROUP: Excerpts from As I Am: An Autobiography by Patricia Neal, copyright © 1988 by Patricia Neal. Reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster Adult Publishing Group.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Nuland, Sherwin B.
The art of aging: a doctor’s prescription for well-being / by Sherwin B. Nuland
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-1-58836-622-1
1. Older people. 2. Aging. 3. Older people—Conduct of life. I. Title.
HQ1061.N92 2007 305.26—dc22 2006049267
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