An agenda for the medical humanities and ageing

Pessimism about ageing is grounded in a decline narrative that upholds youth as embodying the productive, independent self. Challenging this narrative is central to age studies and essential to critical gerontology. The medical humanities, by comparison, have not sufficiently engaged with ageing to date. Rapid demographic shifts across the 20th century, partly brought about by medico-technological progress, have led to a growing number of older people with multiple, chronic, and degenerative health conditions. This, I will argue, is where the medical humanities have a duty to intervene, because their purview and potential is different from that of age studies. The social practices to which illness gives rise are the central object of the medical humanities, and bio-psycho-social factors have had a place in this field since its inception. Embedded in a historical account of the relation of the medical humanities to ageing, and an account of the history of age studies, this article asserts that the medical humanities need to invest their discipline-crossing capacity and knowledge base in ageing. They need to integrate the biological reality of ageing into their descriptive practices and accept biomedicine as a constructive agent in their future work on ageing. This will enhance the field's enormous potential, at the level of policy and practice, to improve ageing for all.