Reprint of the original, first published in 1875.

Excerpt from Longevity: The Means of Prolonging Life After Middle Age My purpose in this work, addressed to persons of middle age and in the decline of life, is not to supersede, the physician in treating their maladies: it is to call attention to those peculiarities of the constitution which distinguish age from youth and manhood, to point out those symptoms of deviation from the healthy standard which are usually disregarded, or considered unavoidable incidents of age, but which insensibly glide into fatal diseases if neglected. A watchful care of themselves by elderly persons, and the adoption of proper measures of relief in the earliest stages of disorder, will, as I have shown, give ease and comfort in place of trouble and suffering, and in many cases insure the prolongation of life. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

After an extensive introduction that takes stock of the relevant research literature on Old Age in the Middle Ages and the early modern age, the contributors discuss the phenomenon of old age in many different fields of late antique, medieval, and early modern literature, history, and art history. Both Beowulf and the Hildebrandslied, both Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival and Titurel, both the figure of Merlin and the trans-European tradition of Perceval/Peredur/Parzival, then the figure of the vetula in a variety of medieval French, English, and Spanish texts, and of the Old Man in The Stricker's Daniel, both the treatment of old age in Langland's Piers the Plowman and in Jean Gerson's sermons are dealt with. Other aspects involve late-antique epistolary literature, early modern French farce in light of Disability Studies, the social role of old, impotent men in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Netherlandish paintings, and the scientific discourse of old age and health since the 1500s. The discourse of Old Age proves to have been of central importance throughout the ages, so the critical examination of the issues involved sheds intriguing light on the cultural history from late antiquity to the seventeenth century.