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Elderhood: Redefining Aging, Transforming Medicine, Reimagining Life

Healthcare and medical training primarily recognize two age groups: children and adults. In real life, there are three, and most of us will spend years or decades longer in elderhood than in childhood. In her New York Times bestselling new book, UCSF Professor Louise Aronson shows how individuals, communities, clinicians and scientists can improve lives and transform healthcare by applying the same creativity, innovation, and effort to elders as we already do for children and adults. Join us for a lively conversation and the fall launch of UCSF’s answer to City Arts & Lectures and The Commonwealth Club!

Presenter: Louise Aronson MD, MFA, Professor, UCSF Division of Geriatrics, Director, UCSF Health Humanities

In conversation with Sharon Kaufman PhD, Professor Emerita, Dept. of Anthropology, History and Social Medicine at the University of California San Francisco.

Speakers:

Sharon Kaufman PhD, is Professor Emerita, Medical Anthropology at UCSF. Her work explores topics at the intersection of aging, medical knowledge and society’s expectations for health. She has examined the changing culture and structure of US medicine and health care delivery at the end of life. She is the author of …And a Time to Die: How American Hospitals Shape the End of Life, and Ordinary Medicine: Extraordinary Treatments, Longer Lives and Where to Draw the Line.

Louise Aronson is a geriatrician, writer, educator, and professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) where she directs UCSF Health Humanities. A graduate of Harvard Medical School and the Warren Wilson Program for Writers, Dr. Aronson has received the Gold Professorship in Humanism in Medicine, the California Homecare Physician of the Year award, and the American Geriatrics Society Clinician-Teacher of the Year award. She is the author of Elderhood: Redefining Aging, Transforming Medicine, and Reimagining Life as well as a short story collection, A History of the Present Illness. Her writing can be found in diverse publications including The New York Times, Discover Magazine, the Lancet, and the New England Journal of Medicine and has earned her a MacDowell fellowship, the Sonora Review Prize, and four Pushcart nominations.

This event is brought to you by the UCSF Library Archives & Special Collections, the Department of Anthropology, History and Social Medicine and UCSF Health Humanities. 

Archives Talks are free and open to the public. Light refreshments provided while supply lasts.