ABSTRACT
Medical humanities ought centrally to include rhetorical studies, a discipline concerned with what words do. Rhetoricians study persuasion, broadly defined, and not only in formal contexts of political or forensic speech-making, but also in contexts of everyday life—including, importantly, life lived in an idiom of health and illness. Rhetorical criticism is both interdisciplinary and polydisciplinary: it can form many alliances, and co-sponsor inquiry with anthropology or history or philosophy, for example. Rhetorical theory offers a construct helpful in considering what are still the most common—that is, negative—views of old people: it offers the idea itself of a speaker’s perceived bad character. Ageist rhetoric includes not only the discursive acts of disregard and disrespect, but also microaggressions in the form of public representations of old people, ubiquitously. Simply, people, when they are young, must come to understand themselves as continuous with the people they will be when they are old: everyone is damaged by ageism.
