Elderhood

Dive into one of the most important books written about ageing in modern medicine with “Elderhood” — essential reading for anyone who works with older adults, loves someone who is ageing, or simply wants to think clearly about a stage of life that most of us prefer not to examine until it arrives.

Louise Aronson, a geriatrician at the University of California San Francisco, spent decades watching medicine consistently underserve its oldest patients — overtreating some, undertreating others, and routinely failing to ask what older adults actually wanted from their remaining years. This book is her answer to that failure. Drawing on patient stories, medical history, personal experience, and social research, she builds a sweeping, honest account of what elderhood — the final third of life — actually looks like in America, and how it could look different. She examines ageism in medical training, the inadequacy of care home systems, the way chronic illness management often ignores quality of life, and the cultural narratives around ageing that do more harm than good. The writing is warm, urgent, and specific — grounded in real patients and real situations rather than abstraction.

Whether you are a geriatrician, a nurse, a social worker, an adult with ageing parents, or someone approaching later life yourself, this book offers a perspective that is both confronting and genuinely hopeful.