Forthcoming Research Seminars and Lectures

22nd November 2012: Lynn Botelho (IUP) - Not Suffering in Silence: Pain and the Seventeenth-Century Medicalization of Old Age

(10 July 2012)

Weekly Research Seminar

This seminar will be held in room 005, 48/49 Old Elvet, Durham.  Refreshments will be served from 11am with the talk commencing  at 11.30am.

Title:

Not Suffering in Silence:  Pain and the Seventeenth-Century Medicalization of Old Age

Abstract:

This paper challenges the assumption that the elderly in the past quietly accepted the pains and ailments of old age.  Drawing upon popular printed medical tracts and manuscript recipe books, this paper argues that by the closing decades of the seventeenth century the pains of old age were something to be treated or cured, and not something simply to be tolerated.  In doing so, this paper challenges the idea that the medicalization of old age and gerontology (although not by that name) were the products of the late seventeenth century and not as is traditionally held that of the nineteenth.