Inventor of the phrase ‘ageism’ dead
Pulitzer-prize winning, United States gerontologist Dr Robert Butler, who first coined the phrase ‘ageism’ died on 4 July at the age of 83.
Dr Butler was “a psychiatrist whose painful youthful realization that death is inevitable prompted him to challenge and ultimately reform the treatment of the elderly through research, public policy and a Pulitzer Prize-winning book,” The New York Times reports.
He worked until three days before dying of acute leukemia.
Dr Butler’s influence was apparent in the widely used word he coined to describe discrimination against the elderly: ‘ageism’.
He defended as healthy the way many old people slip into old memories – even giving it a name, ‘life review’.
Dr Butler was the founding director of the National Institute on Aging at the National Institutes of Health and advocated for the ageing before Congress and the United Nations.
He helped start and led the American Association for Geriatric Psychiatry, the Alzheimer’s Disease Association and the International Longevity Center. The Los Angeles Times wrote:
The United States has undergone a transformation that he explained in his recent book on the phenomenon, ‘The Longevity Revolution.’
In the last century, the average American gained 30 additional years of life, an increase greater than that achieved during the previous 5,000 years of human history. Expected life span grew from 47 years in 1900 to more than 77 today, but medicine has not kept pace with that growth, he argued. He was perhaps best known by the general public as the co-author, with his wife, social worker, Myrna Lewis, of the manual ‘Sex After 60,’ first published in 1976.
The book, republished since as ‘Love and Sex After 60,’ offered advice for dealing with everything from the complicated emotions of remarriage to the mechanics of aging bodies.”
An earlier book, “Why Survive? Being Old in America,” which was based on his observations of “how difficult it was for the elderly to find adequate health care and live with dignity,” won the Pulitzer for general nonfiction in 1976.
