| CHAPTER | PAGE | |
| Introduction | vii | |
| I. | The Youth of Old Age | 1 |
| The turn of the tide of life—Relative amount and importance of work accomplished before and after forty—The sexual life at the turn of the tide in man and woman—Osler’s views and critics (E. G. Dexter, D. A. N. Dorland, E. S. P. Haynes)—Illustrations from Tolstoi, Fechner, Comte, Swedenborg—The typical cases of Segantini, Lenau, von Kleist, de Maupassant, Gogol, Scheffel, Ruskin, and Nietsche—Michaëlis’ “dangerous age” in women—The difficulty of determining this age—The nature of the changes, conscious and unconscious, and the lessons that people in this stage of life should lay to heart—H. G. Wells and Ross. | ||
| II. | The History of Old Age | 32 |
| The age of plants and animals—The Old Stone Age—Treatment of old age among existing savage tribes—The views of Frazer—The ancient Hebrews and the Old Testament—The Greeks (including Sparta, the Homeric Age, the status of the old in Athens, the views of Plato, Socrates’ talks with boys, Aristotle)—The Romans—The Middle Ages—Witchcraft and old women—Attitude of children toward the old—Mantegazza’s collection of favorable and unfavorable views of age—The division of life into stages—The relation of age groups to social strata—The religion of different ages of life—The Vedanta—The Freudian war between the old and the young—History of views from Cornaro to our own time—Bacon—Addison—Burton—Swift. | ||
| III. | Literature by and on the Aged | 100 |
| Harriet E. Paine—Amelia E. Barr—Mortimer Collins—Col. Nicholas Smith—Byron C. Utecht—J. L. Smith—Sanford Bennet—G. E. D. Diamond—Cardinal Gibbons—John Burroughs—Rollo Ogden—James L. Ludlow—Brander Matthews—Ralph Waldo Emerson—Oliver Wendell Holmes—Senator G. F. Hoar—William Dean Howells—H. D. Sedgwick—Walt Mason—E. P. Powell—U. V. Wilson—D. G. Brinton—N. S. Shaler—Anthony Trollope—Stephen Paget—Richard le Gallienne—G. S. Street—C. W. Saleeby—Bernard Shaw—A few typical poems and quotations. | ||
| IV. | Statistics of Old Age and Its Care | 154 |
| I. Numbers of old people increasing in all known lands where data are available—Actuarial and other mortality tables—Expectation of life and death-rate at different ages—Longevity and fecundity—Death-rate in different occupations—Longevity in ancient Egypt and in the Middle Ages—Diversity of statistical methods and results. II. Growing need of care for the indigent old—Causes of improvidence—Ignorance and misconception of what old age is and means—Why the old do not know themselves—Old age pensions in Germany, Austria, Great Britain and her colonies, France, Belgium, United States—Industrial pensions and insurance, beginning with railroads—Trades unions—Fraternal organizations—Retiring pensions in the army and navy—Local and national insurance—Teachers’ pensions—The Carnegie Foundation—Criticism of pension systems—Growing magnitude, urgency, and diversity of views and methods—The Life Extension Institute—“Borrowed Time” and “Sunset” clubs—Should the old organize? | ||
| V. | Medical Views and Treatment of Old Age | 195 |
| The self-knowledge that doctors give—Insidious approach of many diseases—Medical views of the old of body and mind (senile dementia)—Charcot—G. M. Humphrey—Sir James Crichton-Browne—H. M. Friedman—H. Gilford—H. Oertel—A. S. Warthin—W. Spielmeyer—I. L. Nascher—Sir Dyce Duckworth—Robert Saundy—Arnold Lorand—T. D. Crothers—C. G. Stockton—W. G. Thompson—M. L. Price—G. S. Keith—J. M. Taylor—C. W. Saleeby—C. A. Ewald—Raymond Pearl—Protest against the prepotence of heredity in determining longevity. | ||
| VI. | The Contributions of Biology and Physiology | 248 |
| Weismann’s immortality of the germ plasm and his denial of the inheritance of acquired qualities—The truth and limitations of his views—The theories of Hering and Simon—Metchnikoff’s conception of the disharmonies in man, of the rôle of intestinal fauna and their products, of euthanasia, and of the means and effects of prolonging life—C. S. Minot’s conception of the progressive arrest of life from birth on as measured by declining rate of growth, and his neglect to consider the dynamic elements—C. M. Child’s studies of rejuvenation in lower and higher forms of life in the light of the problems of senescence—J. Loeb’s studies of the effects of lower temperature, of toxins and ferments—The preservation of cells of somatic tissues potentially immortal under artificial conditions—Account of the studies of Carrel, Pozzi, and others—Investigations upon the effects on sex qualities and age of the extracts and transplantations of glands, from Claude Bernard—Investigations of Eugene Steinach on the interchange of sex qualities and rejuvenation by glandular operations in animals and man—G. F. Lydston’s work—Serge Voronoff’s experiments and his exposition of the achievements and hopes of glandular therapy—Some general considerations in view of work in this field. | ||
| VII. | Report on Questionnaire Returns | 319 |
| Their value suggestive but only for a class—(1) Age and effect of the first realization of the approach of old age—(2) To what do you ascribe your long life?—(3) How do you keep well?—(4) Are you troubled by regrets?—(5) What temptations do you feel, old or new?—(6) What duties do you feel you still owe to others or to self?—(7) Is interest in public affairs for the far future and past, as compared with what is closer at hand, greater or less?—(8) In what do you take your greatest pleasures?—(9) Do you enjoy the society of children, youth, adults, those of your own age more or less than formerly?—(10) Would you live your life over again?—(11) Did you experience an “Indian summer” of renewed vigor before the winter of age began?—(12) Do you rely more or less upon doctors than formerly?—(13) Do you get more or less from the clergy and the church than formerly?—(14) Do you think more or less of dying and the hereafter?—A few individual returns from eminent people. | ||
| VIII. | Some Conclusions | 366 |
| The early decades of age—The deadline of seventy—The patheticism of the old—The attitude of physicians toward them—Fluctuations of youth—Erotic decline—Alternations in the domain of sleep, food, mood, irritability, rational self-control, and sex—The dawn of old age in women—Dangers of the disparity when December weds May—Sexual hygiene for the old—Mental effects of the dulling of sensations—Lack of mental pabulum—The tedium vitæ—Changes in the emotional life—Age not second childhood—Women in the dangerous age—Need of a new and higher type of old age—Aristotle’s golden mean and the magnanimous man—The age of disillusion—Increased power of synthesis—Nature’s balance between old and young—Superior powers of the old in perspective and larger views—New love of nature and the country—Their preëminence in religion, politics, philosophy, morals, and as judges—Looking within and without—Merging with the cosmos. | ||
| XI. | The Psychology of Death | 439 |
| The attitude of infancy and youth toward death as recapitulating that of the race—Suicide—The death-wish—Necrophilism—The Black Death—Depopulation by the next war—The evolutionary nisus and death as its queller—Death symbolism as pervasive as that of sex—Flirtations of youthful minds with the thought of death—Schopenhauer’s view of death—The separation of ghosts from the living among primitive races—The thanatology of the Egyptians—The journey of the soul—Ancient cults of death and resurrection in the religions about the eastern Mediterranean, based on the death of vegetation in the fall and its revival in the spring, as a background of Pauline Christianity—The fading belief in immortality and Protestantism which now at funerals speaks only of peace and rest—Osler’s five hundred deathbeds—Influential, plasmal, and personal immortality and their reciprocal relations—Moral efficacy of the doctrine of future rewards and punishments—Belief in a future life for the individual being transformed into a belief in the future of the race on earth and the advent of the superman—Does man want personal immortality—Finot’s immortality of the decomposing body and its resolution into its elements—The Durkheim school and the mana doctrine—Schleiermacher—The Schiller-James view of the brain and consciousness as repressive of the larger life of the great Autos—The views of Plato and Kant—Have God and Nature cheated and lied to us if the wish to survive is false?—Noetic and mystic immortality by partaking of the deathlessness of general ideas—Views of Howison, Royce, and others—Is there a true euthanasia or thanatophilia?—Diminution of the desire for personal immortality with culture and age. |