Word: oldsters
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Plan Ahead. The one common denominator that sociologists, psychiatrists, gerontologists and geriatricians see in all the actively productive oldsters of this or any other time in history is a keen continuing interest in some activity, which carries with it a revitalizing sense of participation in life. This may be, Sloan fashion, a continuation of earlier activity, but with a switch from administration to policy, or a new career in public service. It may be that a former avocation can be turned into a vocation. But "make-work" hobbies will not do. The oldster, like the human being...
According to the semilegendary Hippocrates, father of Western medicine, writing 600 years after David, the oldster's lot was not a happy one: "Old men suffer from difficulty of breathing, catarrh accompanied by coughing, difficult micturition, pains at the joints, kidney disease, dizziness, apoplexy, cachexia [wasting], pruritus [itching] of the whole body, sleeplessness, watery discharges from bowels, eyes and nostrils, dullness of sight, cataract, hardness of hearing...
...century. The disorders so often seen in the elderly and aging were dubbed "degenerative," or "the diseases of old age," with the emphasis on "of," as though they were inseparable. The very word senile, from a Latin root meaning simply "old," took on a derogatory hue, and a doddering oldster was redundantly tagged "a senile...
Whiffing a good thing, Upjohn sent scouts to the Big Cypress Reservation near Immokalee, found a tranquil oldster (74) who still hunts, fishes and farms all day without tiring. Billie was free to talk commerce, it developed, because he got religion 14 years ago and quit practice to become a Baptist minister. Last month Upjohn flew Billie in a private plane to Kalamazoo, there besought him (with a new hearing aid and a little cash) to demonstrate his lore...
...That Binds. In Philadelphia, Sam Bookbinder, who always gives a dime to the old shoelace seller by his famed restaurant, but never takes a pair, reported that one day, receiving his dime, the oldster said: "I hate to bring this up, sir, but the laces...