ABSTRACT
In a recent book on growing old, the late Betty Friedan remarked that Western medicine promulgates two polarized attitudes toward senescence. One paints a pessimistic portrait of old age as a period of inevitable mental and physical deterioration that can be met at best with stoic resolution. The opposing viewpoint counters that many elders, in defiance of gloomy stereotypes, enjoy the benefits of wisdom, maturity, and greater independence; the challenge to society is to make the opportunity to do so available to more old people. Friedan positions the traditional medical establishment at the former pole, gerontology at the other.1 Interestingly, her “two faces of age” have an analogue in early modern England, where debate over the virtues of growing old pitted harsh descriptivism against a deferential (often class-based) idealism. Certainly little could be found desirable in seventh-age decrepitude, but the sixth age-the senescent stage that corresponded astrologically with Jupiter-had its benefits. Shakespeare’s Jaques, we remember, takes the low road and associates the sixth stage with the pantaloon, a target of mockery. But Henry Cuffe, expounding The differences of the ages of mans life (1st ed. 1607), reminds his readers that “Old age from Jupiter receiveth gravitie and staydnesse” while the “poysonous infirmities” of “crooked age” all derive from Saturn, later.2
