The Emergence of Biomedicine

In this chapter, the focus on the science of “aging” is significant in the construction of powerful discourses of aging in modernity. “Gerontology” itself is a broad discipline which encompasses psychological, biological, and social analyses of aging. While gerontology is defined as the study of the biological, psychological, and social aspects of aging, social gerontology is concerned especially with the impact of social and cultural conditions on the process of growing old. As will be discussed, social gerontology includes the study of societal attitudes toward aging and how these attitudes influence responses to the perceived needs of older persons, both on an interpersonal and a structural level. There are important implications here, not just for how aging is viewed by biomedical models of aging but for how society and its arrangement of political and economic structures create and sanction social policies grounded in such knowledge bases. Such knowledge bases are focused on (1) “biological aging,” which refers to the internal and external physiological changes that occur in the individual body, and (2) psychological aging, understood as the developmental changes in mental functioning (i.e., emotional and cognitive capacities). Biomedical theories of aging can be distinguished from social constructions of aging by focusing (1) on the biopsychological constituent of aging and (2) on how aging has been socially constructed.