The look for toughness is hardly new. Before recent times, advocates for longevity fell into two familiar time durations. From the 16th century to the 18th century, people worked to extend the lives and energy of aged people; they believed senescence was a time of considerable worth. From the 19th century during the early 20th century, however, anti age advocates generally depicted old age as a time to be feared and despised, devising myriad tactics to be able to get rid of it absolutely.

While sharing little with the advocates of the early modern period, the new anti age movement certainly mirrors lots of the beliefs of the toughness advocates of a century ago. Both groups not just see old age as a sickness to be eradicated by way of injections and operations, but additionally argue that the old represent a giant financial burden. These beliefs reveal that the new anti age circulate, like its early 20th century precursor, is based on more than simple hair dyes, hormones, or diet. Rather, their ideas and actions indirectly serve to marginalize the very process of getting old. ACCORDING to anti age advocates, the fountain of teenage has finally been learned.

Rather than consuming from the mythical well, however it, people who look for limitless youth and vitality are urged to send in their $60 and take delivery of the sweetness formula of the “ingestible growth hormone. ” Grow Young with HGH, the Amazing Medical Plan to Reverse Aging pronounces the title of Ronald Klatz and Carol Kahn's 1998 book 1. The human growth hormone, claims the book's commercial, is a medically proven plan “to lose fat, gain muscle, embellish your sex life, decrease wrinkles, keep away from sickness, and reverse the aging task. ” Once the hormone is fed on, the anti age enthusiasts claim, age itself will now not be an inevitable sickness accompanied by incapacity and disorder. Instead they promise, “new” and “innovative” advances that may “herald a new modern age for humanity: the Ageless Society” 2, p. 3.

The future of anti aging medicine,” writes Ronald Klatz and Robert Goldman, “offers the removing of the disability, deformity, pain, ailment, agony and sorrow of old age. In a few a long time, the basic enfeebled, ailing aged person will be but a gruesome memory of a barbaric past …” 3, p. 13. From the standpoint of a historian, nonetheless it, such claims do not likely appear “new” or “progressive. ” Rather, both in the categorization of old age as a disease, and in the hope of eradicating the last stage of life, these declarations certainly echo well enunciated ideas of the past. As this article will show, such pronouncements are hardly novel; rather, they mirror the medical, social, and financial attitudes of those that look for limitless youth and vitality.

By trying to extend the life cycle, or to eliminate old age entirely, anti age advocates reflect important beliefs about elderly people and their role in society. As discovered via previously attempts at prolongevity, behind the modern day promise of renewal by way of hormones, hair dyes, and cosmetic surgery lies a vision of what it means to be old, and an understanding of the impact of elderly people on American society. With the Renaissance, the premise of prolongevity constructed out of the assumption that people could manipulate both the length of their time on earth and the high quality of their lifestyles. One of essentially the most influential of those advocates was Luigi Cornaro, an Italian nobleman who in 1550 wrote The Art of Living Long 4. Translated into English, French, Dutch, and German, the book became the bible of prolongevity advocates who asserted that a long and healthy life was a very real opportunity.

By the 19th century, the English version of Cornaro's book had passed through greater than 50 editions 5. In his study, the writer argued that people weren't destined to die at 60 or 70, but with care and a good charter, could live extremely long lives. The key to this survival, he believed, lay in a simple life based on the principle of moderation in all things. His own life served as a terrific example of his philosophy. Suffering at age 35 from a considerable number of of ailments adding gout, fever, and dehydration, he reformed his conduct and lived happily and healthily until his death at 98. In formulating his philosophy, Cornaro espoused a widely shared concept that old age was attributable to a significant decline in vital energy.

The force supposedly supplied the indispensable energy for growth in adolescence and balance in middle age. By senescence, but it, the reserve was gone; it left most people depleted and debilitated. Those capable of maintain their vital energy—even if via diet, moderation, or simple good luck—were apt to event a healthy and active old age. With the right conservation of this vitality, the illnesses that accompanied old age would disappear, leaving people happy and productive until their final days. The secret, then, to a longevity was simple: The fountain of teenage was available to all who controlled the means to retain their vital energy.

Significantly, in advocating the new routine, Cornaro and his fans didn't see old age itself as an enemy to be vanished, but as a stage of life owning its own riches and rewards. “I had never known,” Cornaro wrote, “that the area was stunning until I reached old age. Indeed,” he added, “old age is the time to be most coveted, as it is then that prudence is better exercised, and the fruits of the entire other virtues are enjoyed with the least opposition; as a result of by that point, the passions are subdued, and man gives himself up wholly to reason” 4, p. 43. Cornaro, basically, gave four causes for approaching a fit old age with great expectancies.

First, he noted that by achieving a complicated age, an individual might come to keep in mind the worthiness of a longevity; second, he believed that old age may be a “happy place of life” where americans could benefit from the results of their youthful endeavors; third, he depicted the overall stage of life as characterized by learning and virtue, assets that could have great benefit to the community; and finally, he believed that, with the removal of disease, an individual's end would include a calm “natural death,” instead of in pain and suffering 4. In this portrayal, Cornaro estimated putting off the diseases that regularly accompanied old age—not old age itself. For him, the stage was one who provided both great promise and fulfillment. With the Enlightenment, this philosophy of life extension was espoused by a couple of the philosophes. From Condorcet to Benjamin Franklin, best thinkers believed that, in the centuries ahead, science would solve the difficulty of debility in old age.

Individuals who followed the simple rules of nature could then exist until their deaths with the energy of maturity and the wisdom of their advanced years. Most in particular, many of these rationalist thinkers did not trust that the cutting back strength of the aging body implied an equal weak point of the mind. Benjamin Rush, for instance, was convinced that most old individuals—and particularly people that were temperate in their daily habits—would retain full use of their mental powers until they reached the grave. In 1797, in a study of a gaggle of octogenarians, he found that, though some elderly americans had faulty memories of the recent past, their highbrow, moral, and religious powers were completely unimpaired. His recommendation for a cheerful old age, hence, was not to beat the laws of nature, but to bear in mind them so that the aging americans remain efficient members of society 6.

Throughout the 19th century, however it, this notion of a crucial and significant senescence was challenged by scientific discoveries that defined old age as a sickness to be hated and feared. Based on research first done at the hospitals in Paris, elite physicians began to link old age to real physiological adjustments in the body. By tracing lesions in the tissues, and later changes in the cell, they concluded that old age was not simply a decline in vitality which can easily be controlled via a regime of diet or train. Examining the aging eye, the lack of listening to, or the development of arteriosclerosis, they asserted that aging, like many sickness entities, seemed to cause a large number of pathological transformations that were both revolutionary and inevitable. As a result, clinicians agreed that disorder and old age were inseparably intertwined, if not quite synonymous. “It is impossible,” wrote the ‘father’ of geriatrics, I.

L. Nascher: “to draw a sharp line among health and ailment in old age. With every organ and tissue present process a degenerative change which affects the physiological applications, it is an issue for personal opinion to assess at what point the adjustments in the anatomical qualities and physiological applications depart from the standard changes of senility and to what degree” 7, p. 94. By the early 20th century, to most experts, aging was a ailment that destroyed both the body and the mind. Previous beliefs that actual debility or mental decay can be prevented seemed overly optimistic and definitely unscientific.

“The weight of evidence,” wrote Dr. W. H. Curtis, “seems to establish the proven fact that old isn't physiological, but pathological, at the least its visible and considerable evidences are pathological ones” 8, p. 401. Early signs of aging, similar to a loss of short term memory or a slowing of the step, only foretold the horrors that were necessarily to return.

“From the beginning to the end,” explained Dr. Charles Mercier, “the activity is a continual, gradually revolutionary loss. Conduct, intelligence, feeling, and self cognizance steadily diminish, and eventually cease to exist … The decadence of old age is, actually, a dementia, a deprivation of mind” 9, p. 305. While many physicians argued that this notion of old age called for the establishment of a distinct study of growing older, few dedicated themselves to “senile” therapeutics.

The theoretical build that defined aging as a modern sickness perceived to limit both research and optimism. The majority agreed that, not just was it as complicated to split normal old age from its pathological state, but they also lacked the potential to stop the inevitable decline that led to debility and death. Not surprisingly, then, few chose to focus on the diseases of old age 10. For a very small variety of physicians, however it, this conceptual understanding of aging served as a demand action. If old age was a hated disorder, why not simply attack and destroy it?Could not the identical scientific build that traced the decaying cell be used to inhibit its deterioration or return it to its youthful state?Several scientists answered this query with a powerful “yes!” They believed, as Eugen Steinach would argue, that their research into the aging job definitively proved that “the senile activity is reversible,” if medical doctors were simply inclined to intervene 11, p. 123.

Unlike the philosophes, they no longer believed that the important thing lay in operating with nature. Rather, they argued, seemingly immutable herbal laws could be triumph over if they took immediate action. For many in this group, the cause of the “ailment of old age” was rooted in the strategy of cell growth and foodstuff. The cell, they asserted, was immortal; only its development in the body caused its degeneration and death. One of the first to suggest this situation in dating to old age was Elie Metchnikoff in the late 1800s.

Focusing on cells termed phagocytes, he contended that they poisoned the body and led to decline. In response, he recommended a diet rich in lactic acid, which, he declared, would cause the eradication of intestinal putrefaction and the destruction of microbes that caused the body to decay 12. Following the same logic, Charles A. Stephens argued that the road to sturdiness and the removing of death lay in the perfection of cell meals. Believing that he could retain the youthfulness of tissues via proper nutrition and stimulation, he predicted a time when cells would never age.

There could be, in accordance to Stephens, no senescence or death, but simply eternal youth. “Immortal life could be accomplished by assistance from utilized science;” he declared, “it is what the whole scheme of evolution moves forward to” 13, p. 178. While these physicians looked to diet and hygiene to resolve the mysteries of getting old, others took a more experimental and invasive method. A small—though well publicized—group was confident that the fountain of minor lay deep within the endocrine system.

Focusing especially upon the testicles and ovaries, they were adamant that herbal debility and decline of old age may be conquer. Characterizing their doubters as “lack scientific objectivity and sufficient adventure” or “unjust, biased, and unscientific” 14, pp. 8 and 10, they actively pursued operations and experiments that, they were confident, would result in countless years of youthful undertaking. One of the 1st to carry out such experiments was C. E.

Brown Sequard. Linking the aging of the body to a weakening of the sexual characteristic, he argued in 1889 that technology—and radical intervention—could return these key sex glands to their adolescent state. At age 72, he claimed he had proved the validity of his thesis on his own body. Injecting himself with a mixture of animal sex glands, he asserted that he had restored his own power to its younger state. “The physiological consequences of the extract will seem to you,” he wrote “as they gave the impression to me, most surprising. It is enough to state that every thing I had not been able to do or had done badly for a few years due to my advanced age I am today able to carry out most admirably” 15, p.

12. Spread by both scientific and lay journals, the scoop of his work led to great public and business hobby. In August 26, 1889, The Medical News introduced that a firm of druggists “claims to have found out and to provide for use the active principle contained in ‘testicular fluid. ’” According to the agency, the new compound, Spermine, was composed of “semen, calf's heart, calf's liver, bull's testicles, and also from the skin of anatomical specimens kept under alcohol. ” The luck of the drug could not be doubted. “Physiological experiments,” the company declared, “have based the undeniable fact that in the salts of the alkaloid Spermine, we have the cause for the stimulant outcomes observed by Dr.

Brown Sequard. ” With its use, the weak spot of old age was simply a remnant of the unscientific past 16, p. 58. Although patients lined up for injections, the initial popularity of the product and Brown Sequard's method did not produce long run luck. Other businesses found themselves charged with fraud for swindling a gullible public 13.

Nonetheless, all the way through the early 20th century, an increasing variety of physicians argued that their experimental systems had indeed triumph over nature by casting off old age and restoring vigor. In 1914, Dr. Frank Lydston of Chicago performed human testis transplants on a few patients, adding one on himself. Claiming to be one of the first to experiment with this technique, he argued that the grafting process bogged down the onset of senility. Not only did it improve his sexual performance, but even turned his gray hair back to its normal color.

17. While Lydston believed he never obtained the attention or credit he deserved, the work of L. L. Stanley almost immediately bought common scientific notice. In 1919, Stanley, a doctor at San Quentin prison, got rid of the testicles of a these days executed murderer and transplanted them into a 60 year old inmate deemed “prematurely” senile 15, p.

26. In the pages of Endocrinology, he later mentioned that he had carried out the operation on 643 inmates as well as 13 physicians, all with high-quality results. According to Stanley, not just had the gland grafting operation “rejuvenated” the participants, but eradicated a couple of of indicators, starting from acne to asthma 18. By 1928, one researcher estimated that the Stanley method have been conducted readily with over 50,000 patients 13. Although later studies revealed that such operations couldn't possible have been successful, during the 1920s, a few physicians became international celebrities by appearing these grafts.

While Stanley's unique situation as a jail surgeon supplied testicles from human individuals, others experimented—effectively they claimed—with a couple of of animal gland grafts. Dr. Serge Voronoff, doubtless probably the most well known for this technique, turned to monkey gland grafts to rejuvenate his patients. Beginning first with operations using the glands of chimpanzees, and then later with baboons, he traveled the globe, performing operations, giving scientific papers, and showing his star affected person, Edward Liadet, a 76 year old London businessman who, after receiving his monkey gland transplant, claimed to feel and appear as if he were no more than 45. Although Liadet died within 2 years of the operation, Voronoff was convinced that his method was a hit 18.

The reaction from more orthodox scientific specialists ranged from polite hearings to direct attacks. While the journal Endocrinology in the beginning published a few of the papers, many gurus immediately challenged the premise of transplanting animal glands onto humans. Immediately following the announcement of Brown Sequard's experiments, Dr. Allen McLane Hamilton argued, “The theory is hostile to all the laws of body structure and chemistry. Further than that, I consider it is a very unhealthy continuing, and that it is time for respected physicians to specific their disapproval of the experiments. There is excellent danger of introducing a violent poison into the system” 16, p.

102. By 1920, Dr. Arthur Dean Bevan, the President of the American Medical Association, discussed the difficulty in his presidential deal with, “It is a scientific fact,” he stated, “that any overseas gland brought into the human body must disappear within a short time. This is as elementary and incontrovertible as that two and two are four” 15, p. 49.

Editorials in the Journal of the American Medical Association called for more studies, and noted “the convenience at which fragmentary data are woven into a narrative of technical good fortune” 15 p. 41, while in France, the French Surgical Congress and Academy of Medicine refused to assist Voronoff's ideas or supply a platform for his analysis. Voronoff, nonetheless it, simply characterized these associations as “decaying, rundown companies who antagonistic all change and innovation” 15, p. 54. Despite increasing doubts in regards to the efficacy of his operation, he continued to perform both human and animal operations to generic acclaim.

Not quite, many of these gland transplanting physicians portrayed their operations as benevolent acts during which they alone were eliminating the “gruesome” ailment of old age. They were, nevertheless it, not blind to the financial benefit they could gain. Voronoff, for instance, charged among £500 and £1000 for each operation. Probably no “doctor” profited more from the search for the glandular fountain of teenage, nevertheless it, than “Dr. ” John R.

Brinkley. Having studied 3 months at the Eclectic Medical University of Kansas, Brinkley acquired a medical degree that he later used to become authorized in Kansas and Arkansas. Upon settling in Milford, Kansas, he began grafting goat glands onto particular person attempting cures starting from impotence to madness, in addition to hoping that they could obtain the secrets to eternal youth. Arguing that “you are just as old as your glands,” Brinkley built his own clinic during which he charged $750 for a goat gland transplant and $2000 for a human one 19. By 1923, he had dependent one of the nation's biggest radio stations, KFKB, in Kansas. Along with music, religion, and his attack on traditional medication, he advertised his operations and pharmaceuticals.

By the top of the decade, he had become a millionaire, comprehensive with a couple of homes, two airplanes, a yacht, and a lot of cars. Eventually, nonetheless it, he found himself attacked by orthodox medicine. In 1930, the Kansas Board of Medical Registration and Examination revoked his license, while in the pages of the Journal of the American Medical Association, Morris Fishbein categorised Brinkley “a blatant quack,” complicated his academic qualifications and methods 19. After a failed campaign for the governor of Kansas, the “goat gland doctor” moved to Mexico, where he once again advertised his beliefs on an impressive radio station. Gland grafting, however, was not the only operation early 20th century physicians used to increase middle age. Eugen Steinach attained international acclaim during the technique he termed “vasoligation” that cut the vas deferens and directed the sperm from the testicles back into the body.

Contending that sperm held great reinvigorating powers, he unique numerous case studies during which the operation restored youth and vigor to both animals and men. In 80% of his cases, he argued, senility disappeared; both mentally and physically, the sufferers again to their “presenile” state. “The harmonic healing of so many failing capacities,” he argued, proves that reactivation is not confined to single organs and positively not merely to sexual applications, but, as already insisted upon, that it embraces the substance of the full organism and extends into each particular person cell structure. In questioning this fact, we now have also spoke back our essential question, which was even if the senile task is “reversible” 11 p. 151. Although most docs commonly directed their operations to men, physicians such as Voronoff, Steinach, and others came to believe that girls may be “rejuvenated” besides through surgical intervention 20.

While Steinach preferred injections of the “follicular hormone” and radiation of the ovaries, others began to transplant ovaries into menopausal patients. The end result, rejuvenation recommend Norman Haire declared, was almost always first rate. In the senile female, he wrote, in 1924: “he implantation of an ovary has very hanging effects. If an ovary is transplanted from a tender into an ageing female it ceases to supply ova, but continues to secrete hormones which circulate in the blood of its new host and convey great improvement in mental, actual and sexual health, and stimulate the host's own ovaries to renewed undertaking of both its purposes. The senile female becomes more lively, shows renewed sexual desire, exerts a renewed enchantment over the male, and after a longer period of sterility is again capable of fitting pregnant and generating offspring” 21, p. 32.

Numerous case research from these docs testified to extraordinary effects as aged, haggard old women all of sudden became sexually attractive and engaging. Despite the transformations in method and types of operations, a majority of these researchers shared one clear belief: Aging was an enemy to be attacked at all costs. Without query, to become older was to become impotent and dead. Old age, according to Stephens, was a period of “grossness, coarseness, and ugliness” 13, p. 177.

The body weakened, the mind grew dim. In this characterization, senescence was hardly associated with wisdom or experience. Rather, not anything in the last stage of life was worthy of keeping up. “The alleged joys of old age,” wrote Voronoff in 1928, “have been imagined to console us in our downfall, which is viewed as inevitable and irremediable” 18, p. 73.

The only hope was to get rid of it totally through an immediate attack, in the sort of laboratory analysis, invasive operations, or a myriad of foods and prescriptions. Embedded in this clinical view of old age was the assumption that not only were aged people nonproductive and obsolescent, but additionally they represented a severe economic problem to trendy society. For many commentators, turn of the century western industrial societies were facing a crisis of aging. Believing that the old held power and recognize in agricultural societies, they bemoaned what they looked as if it would be the declining status of elderly people in the fashionable world. In their eyes, to be old was to be poor; modernization, for the old, meant dependence instead of recognize.

“The socioeconomic problem of the old man or woman,” wrote aging expert Isaac Rubinow, “is mainly a problem of recent society, as a result of the the rapid industrialization” 22, p. 302. Assuming that the old could no longer compete in a worldwide that idolized the young and depended on new technological skills, aging specialists asserted that aged people had been discarded on the “industrial scrap heap” only to face inevitable impoverishment 23. “For the comprehensive mass of wage earners,” pension advocate Abraham Epstein defined, “inability to maintain their regular employment makes dependency in old age inescapable and inevitable” 24, p. 60. As old age was an incurable disease, and and not using a hope of keeping up their health, elderly people would have little choice but to hunt refuge in the poorhouse or rely on their infants or the state for aid in their inevitable dotage.

The weak point of the old, hence, was not simply an individual scientific problem but looked as if it would challenge the prosperity and progress of the nation. Social as well as medical experts on aging utilized a big selection of data to prove the bad impact of the old on contemporary society. Elie Metchnikoff, as an example, noted that France spent huge sums keeping up 2 million people aged 70 years and older. “Already it is complained,” he wrote, “that the burden of assisting old people is too heavy and statesmen are perturbed by the enormous rate which might be entailed by State help of the aged” 12, p. 134. Even the new film market of the early 20th century introduced this message to its mass audience.

In a quick silent film, D. W. Griffith pictured the horrible plight of the aged, and asked, in his title, “What Shall we do with our Aged?” as his aged protagonist hobbled off to the almshouse. Those who had already succumbed to the ravages of old age were obviously pictured as the marginalized other—they had become little more than an issue for themselves and a lifeless drain on society. The only hope, sturdiness advocates proclaimed, was to use technology and know-how to cast off the stage entirely.

To help this competition, many aging advocates pointed with statistical inaccuracy to the reputedly becoming proportion of aged individuals who filled the almshouse. In 1880, they argued, only 33% of the nation's residents of the poorhouses have been old; by 1904 the proportion had risen to 53%, and by 1923, to an astonishing 67% 25. These numbers, they asserted, proved that old age was an appalling stage of existence. By the 1930s, the federal government accepted these statistics as one of the rationales for adopting federal pensions. “The predominance of the aged in the almshouses,” wrote the Committee on Economic Security, “is an indication of their increasing dependency” 26. What few advocates recognized, but it surely, was that the becoming share of aged inmates within the asylum was not due to expanding impoverishment of the old but to the elimination of alternative, often more youthful inmates.

Nationally, in reality, the percentage of all elderly people who became almshouse citizens remained rather constant at 2% 27. Nonetheless, aging advocates time and again claimed that the almshouse demonstrated the horror of old age. Unless excessive action was taken, the executive would be beaten with the price of their care. For physicians equivalent to Elie Metchnikoff, the one hope for solving this seemingly ever becoming issue was to look to the discoveries and techniques of clinical science. “When we have decreased or abolished such causes of precocious senility as intemperance and sickness,” he wrote in 1908, “it will now not be indispensable to give pensions at the age of sixty or seventy years.

The cost of supporting the old, as a substitute of increasing, will lessen progressively” 12, p. 134. Although Metchnikoff looked to future research, most of the anti age surgeons argued that the pending crisis were solved. Touting their operations, they declared that they'd already discovered how to stop the inevitable poverty of the old. With surgical transplants, they contended, the old would now not suffer debility or sickness; they would remain productive and self sufficient indefinitely.

In 1926, definitely, Voronoff proclaimed that his manner would empty old age asylums and allow the inmates “to resume for many years an active mode of life, as a substitute of remaining a burden to the neighborhood. ” Convinced of the efficacy of the technique, he suggested that such operations should immediately occur “on a huge scale” in all establishments that housed the old 20, p. 110. Two years later, he noted the economic impact of his operation on a 64 year old widow whose “income were diminishing, poverty was facing her, and she came to me with a cry of distress, asking me to restore her energy and her energy for work, so that she might be saved from definitely shrinking and being thenceforth unable to help her son. ” After he grafted an ovary from a female chimpanzee, he pronounced that the operation “… literally converted this poor woman … Her figure had again become erect, her movements alert; her face no longer wore the expression of pain that made it look so old; the wrinkles, additional, were less marked, consequently evidently of the better tone of the muscles which is usually to be located after grafting. But what had a good time the worthy woman more was that she was again able to climb frivolously her six flights of steps, work twelve hours a day, and feel herself a renewed energy which restored her moral courage to stand the struggle for life” 18, p.

186. In the 1920s, such pronouncements were taken quite heavily. Following one of Voronoff's testis graft operations, a Hungarian coverage company refused to pay an old age pension to a patient. With the monkey gland connected to his body, the fellow, the agency asserted, could not claim the annuity that have been meant for the debilitated old 15. Other coverage businesses hoped that Steinach's vasoligation procedure would save them from the increasing high cost of annuities. “Recently,” stated Steinach enthusiast George F.

Corners, in 1923, “at a gathering of underwriters in New York, the effect of Steinach's discovery on life insurance, incapacity clauses, etc. , was mentioned with much animation. Provisions for old age, pensions, etc. , will be subjected to monstrous changes, if the Steinach operation turns into ordinary” 28, pp. 49–50.

Here, it seemed was an answer to the transforming into fiscal burden of the elderly population. Extreme scientific activities could “cure” the disorder of old age and impede the reputedly imminent economic crisis. Beginning in the 1940s, this message was conveyed with decreasing frequency. The failure of many of those miracle treatments to bring infinite youth, along with the institution of Social Security and the starting to be variety of deepest pension plans, all served to lessen the can provide of prolongevity advocates and the cruel descriptions of aging. Instead of categorizing the complete stage as a sickness, newly formed organizations comparable to the American Geriatrics Society and The Gerontological Society of America sought to separate normal old age from treatable, pathological circumstances.

Authorities who had once emphasized the inability of the old now spoke of the last stage of life as a time of independence and autonomy. In newspapers and magazines, images of decrepit aged couples in the almshouse were often replaced by happy photographs of newly retired “seniors” who spent their final years on the golf course in pension supported enjoyment. Information on planning for retirement, tips on autonomous living, and advice on sexuality after menopause filled the pages of literature directed to the aging community and their households 27. In the early 1990s, nonetheless it, beliefs about the uselessness of old age and the need to eliminate the aging activity have reappeared, espoused by the founders of the American Academy of Anti Age Medicine A4M. Established in 1993 by 12 practitioners, the A4M has dedicated itself to “addressing the phenomenon of aging as a treatable disorder. ” In books, web sites, and television infomercials, leaders of the A4M again image old age as the finest enemy, a deplorable state that calls for eradication.

“Once aging is viewed as a disorder,” proclaims Dr. Ronald Klatz, one of the founders of the anti age circulation, “then it becomes a treatable condition. ” According to the anti age literature, with proper hormone cure, train, plastic surgery, and dietary supplements, people can then look forward to the “END OF AGING” and assume countless years endowed with the energy and look of the center aged 2, pp. 3–4. In their method and their attitudes, this movement manifestly shares little with the 1st wave of sturdiness advocates. Unlike Cornaro, Condorcet, or Rush, the anti age advocates see not anything of value in old age itself.

Few in the A4M would endorse Cornaro's notion that “old age is the time to be most coveted” 4, p. 43. Hardly a period of wisdom, or contemplation, the last stage of life is characterized only as a time of weak spot and disorder. According to the founders of the move, old age is just a “constellation of degenerative issues which lead indirectly to disability and death” 2, p. 4.

As the final stage of life is obviously a time of “prolonged soreness and decrepitude” 29, p. ix, those that have succumbed to its ravages are portrayed as the most marginal of americans. But if the new anti age advocates repeat few of the information of their 16th century, 17th century, and 18th century precursors, they naturally mirror many of the attitudes and practices of a century ago. Although they depict their philosophy and practices as marking a new and progressive approach to the eradication of old age, their view of the aging process, in addition to their strategies of “curing” it, vividly echo the strategies, beliefs, and actions of the late 19th and 20th centuries' longevity specialists. To the members of A4M, as to the advocates of the early 20th century, old age is not simply a life stage, but a ailment that brings disorder, poverty, and decrepitude. The culprit, both groups would agree, is the cell whose aging transformation within the body stands in the way of immortality.

And, just like the interventionist doctors of a century ago, the brand new anti age experts argue that this task can be “cured” via direct action. Although doctors such as Steinach and Voronoff had identified the sex glands as key to the process, the members of the A4M now pin their hopes on what they term “multi hormone optimization” and particularly note the importance of the human growth hormone. “By replenishing your supply of growth hormone,” write Ronald Klatz and Carol Kahn in Grow Young with HGH, “that you can recover your vigor, health, looks, and sexuality. For the 1st time in human history, we can intervene in the aging activity, restore many aspects of teenybopper, resist disorder, substantially improve the quality of life, perhaps even extend the life span itself. The ‘Fountain of Youth’ lies within the cells of each of us.

All you need to do is unlock it” 1, p. 15. Steinach and Voronoff, of course, would have argued vociferously that this was not “the 1st time in human history. ” They, too, had contended that they'd “intervened in the aging job. ” And, like the present day stories from happy sufferers, the turn of the century physicians had displayed “before” and “after” pictures and case studies.

In words and pictures, they, like their ultra-modern opposite numbers, had argued that such indisputable photographs proved that they'd stopped the cell from aging and successfully lower back their members to happy middle age. For Steinach and Voronoff, as for the members of the A4M, old age was a “gruesome” disease that can be scientifically eradicated in the course of the accurate aggregate of hormones, diet, and surgical procedure. Moreover, despite warnings that such solutions can have little effect, or in fact, may be dangerous 30, p. 29 and 31, both groups eschew the basic medical establishment, discovering their methods and strategies to be elitist and out of date. In the early 20th century, aging interventionists criticized the scientific institution that questioned their operations and demanded extra research.

The traditional academies, they contented, were “old-fashioned” or “decaying”; the time for action was now. A similar perspective is expressed by the A4M. According to Klatz and Kahn: “It took forty years before the medical institution gave its nod for routine substitute of estrogen and progesterone in post menopausal women and it may well take an alternate forty years before it gives the nod to growth hormone replacement. We accept as true with the consequences of not acting are far worse than the consequences of acting” 1, p. 28. Not particularly, like the gland doctors before them, the leaders of the A4M have had their practices and credentials assailed by the clinical and legal groups.

In 2000, the State of Illinois Department of Professional Regulations challenged A4M founders Ronald Klatz, DO, and Robert Goldman, DO, who, in a lot of books, had identified themselves as MDs. Although both men had received an MD degree from the Central America Health Sciences University School of Medicine in Belize, the state ruled that they were not approved to use this credential in Illinois. As a result, on December 6, 2000, Klatz and Goldman agreed to pay $5000 apiece and “cease and desist” from choosing themselves as MDs 32. Much like Brinkley, the goat gland doctor who had battled with the American Medical Association and the Kansas Medical Board, the leaders of the A4M have had to revise their credentials according to expert standards. But the similarities to their precursors go well past these conflicts with orthodox drugs or even their shared definition of aging. In justifying their beliefs, both groups also repeatedly point to statistical “proof” to aid their contentions.

Almost every work of the A4M begins with a discussion of the demographic revolution that has occurred in the life cycle—seeming indeniable confirmation that we are actually witnessing the exponential growth in the years at the end of the life cycle. In Brain Power, Bob Goldman, Ronald Klatz, and Lisa Berger customarily note, “In 1799, the average life span was 25 years—as it had been for centuries. But today we age very in a different way. By 1899, just a century ago, the average life span had reached 48 years. Now it is almost 80 years, and scientists are predicting that common life spans will reach 120 to 150 by the year 2049” 33, p. 7.

Relying on graphs and bars that imply that technology had added more than 30 years to the lives of the old, they argue that the long run implications are clear. As Mary Ann Liebert proclaims in Advances in Anti Aging Medicine, “the A4M maintains a belief and expectation that human longevity can be elevated to as much as 250 years, which could be considered “human immortality. ” We can, she asserts, “be capable of live practically constantly” 34, p. xvii. Like the aging advocates who employed statistic “proof” from the almshouse, but it surely, the demographic figures from the life cycle hardly demonstrate what the authors contend. The dramatic change in mortality rates seen in the 20th century is not primarily due to an expansion in the last years of the life cycle.

Rather, it is essentially the results of the removal of formative years morality that after served to depress common life expectancy. Even in colonial America, 70% of all americans who reached age 25 survived to 60. And, while the twentieth century has skilled the first increase in the years at the top of the life cycle, this boom has been far slower than implied: In 1900, individuals who attained their 65th birthday could expect a further 11. 9 years of life; by 1950, it has risen to 13. 9 years, and by 1978, 16. 1 years 35.

Several geriatricians argue, in reality, that even when cancer and heart ailment were definitely eradicated, life expectancy would only boom 7 years for ladies and 8 for men—hardly the unlimited life span expected by some anti aging specialists 36. Finally, and most troubling perhaps, not just do these can provide hark back to hopes of the durability advocates of the 19th and early 20th centuries, but the founders of the A4M have once again characterised those who have experienced old age or any age linked illnesses as the enemy depleting the country of its wealth and prosperity. “As |Cellcosmet Hand Cream know,” writes Dr. Klatz, “America is in deep bother. Our nation faces probably the most perilous threat to our social balance since the Civil War.

… America now stands at ground zero, facing economic and sociological destruction, burning in the flashpoint of a 76 megaton age bomb. Over the following 25–30 years, the fallout from this bomb will begin its slow wind drift over the American panorama, as 76 million aging baby boomers cause an unprecedented crisis in geriatric medicine and in our social and financial assist system. The largest generation ever born in the world will require clinical and economic supplies unmatched in history as they enter their twilight years. … Treating their degenerative diseases and, in lots of cases, helping them through 30 or 40 years of retirement will place unmatched calls for on this nation's economic resources. … Who can pay for these increased facilities?The answer, of course, is the more youthful generations.

They will pay. And pay. And pay, even more” 2, p. 1. According to Klatz, the only solution to this crisis is to follow the prescriptions of the anti age stream.

“Those of us here today,” he writes, “know a HIGHER truth … And in actual fact mankind is poised at the fringe of an increase of epic proportions. We the leaders of the Anti Aging flow might actually help to bring in a new modern age for humanity: The Ageless Society. There is a remedy for this apocalypse of aging, and this remedy comes just in time to save America. This remedy is the new technological know-how of Anti Aging Medicine represented by the American Academy of Anti Aging Medicine” 2, p. 3.

“In order to avert the financially, socially, and medically burdensome task of taking good care of the swelling aged population,” Klatz argues somewhere else, his software must be widely adopted. It is, he declares, “a crucial vital to hold the health of society in the twenty second century” 37, p. 59. The apocalypse of aging, the sickness of old age, the horror of wrinkles, and the loss sexuality, as well as the “burdensome task” of helping the old, all reflect beliefs that transcend simple hair dye or train programs. They reveal the return of disturbing ideas in regards to the nature of elderly people and their place in society. As in the campaign of the sturdiness advocates 100 years earlier, and unlike the feelings of individuals akin to Cornaro, those who have selfishly succumbed to the ravages of age have once again become the enemy ready to problem and break the nation's financial growth and prosperity.

From the point of view of history, then, the brand new fountain of teen won't simply be offering its supplicants the hope of fewer wrinkles and a more active sex life. In both its formulation for continued youth and its contempt for aged people, the anti age stream, like its late 19th century and early 20th century opposite numbers, tends to demean and marginalize the very process of growing older.