ABSTRACT
This chapter takes issue with the way that those social scientists who occupy center stage in the debate over the relationship between ill health and old age have framed their argument. In the nineteenth century, for the first time, writers produced a growing body of literature devoted strictly to the ills of senescence. The stereotype of the elderly as a uniformly needy and sick population is a strong one in American culture. Instead of denying that there is a correlation between old age and physical problems, acceptance of the relationship while at the same time exploring what these physical changes mean to those who experience them seems a better way to promote a more realistic cultural construction of old age. Social policies by necessity treat the elderly as a category, but in their everyday lives old people are treated by most of those around them, especially those closest to them, as unique individuals.
