ABSTRACT
Historians, philosophers and cultural critics have written about aging and the aged since the Greeks and Romans. In this our Western heritage, youth and vitality were prized over old age, except, perhaps, in governance. The Romans continued to prize bodily youth but permitted old men to govern. For centuries, bodies were seen as the same gender; women were the same as men but turned inside-out. The differences in aging between women and men have had various explanations, none of them particularly flattering to women. But why does it have to happen, this aging of the body? The process of aging and death has been the subject of inquiry in Western culture from the time of the Greeks. There have been four general explanations, by experts, for aging and the miseries of the edifice: the humors, God's punishment, a natural process or a set of medical problems that can be cured.
