Squaring the Curve: The Anatomo-Politics of Ageing, Life and Death

Moreira, Tiago; Palladino, Paolo

doi:10.1177/1357034x08093571

Cited by 22 publications

(15 citation statements)

References 69 publications

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“…Challenging the dominance of definitions of old age based on medical criteria also involves challenging the biologisation of old age (cf. Rose 2001Rose , 2007Moreira and Palladino 2008). What is understood as health has changed across cultures and through history, particularly through differing notions of disease.…”

Section: Who Can Be In Favour Of Death and Disease?mentioning

confidence: 97%

Ageing, Anti-ageing, and Anti-anti-ageing: Who are the Progressives in the Debate on the Future of Human Biological Ageing?

Vincent

2009

Medicine Studies

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This paper provides both an overview of and a personal perspective on the field of 'antiageing'. In the late 20th century, progress in the science of ageing re-invigorated activity designed to avoid biological ageing. For some the objective was to abolish the need to die of old age. This anti-ageing movement includes a diverse range of people: hard scientists working in well-funded and established university laboratories, slick corporate-marketing executives and new-age entrepreneurs selling herbal elixirs. The movement has attracted anti-anti-ageing critical comment from three sources: moral critique located in philosophy and religion, scepticism from established scientists in the field of biology and gerontology, and challenge from critical social gerontology. Anti-ageing activists have labelled their critics as 'conservative' for opposing the inevitable progress of science. The paper argues that the alternative perspective, which sees the anti-ageing movement as a route by which a biologisation of old age inhibits people from achieving a culturally valued final part to life, is the progressive one.

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Section: Who Can Be In Favour Of Death and Disease?mentioning

confidence: 97%

Ageing, Anti-ageing, and Anti-anti-ageing: Who are the Progressives in the Debate on the Future of Human Biological Ageing?

Vincent

2009

Medicine Studies

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“…Aging and death go hand in hand and with the moral significance attributed to mortality, so are aging and dying morally vital aspects of the human experience. Despite the fact that the impulse for immortality is deeply human (Gruman 1966(Gruman [2003Mitchell 2004: 162;Roughley 2000) and our biomedical and scientific activity is largely directed at the prevention of death (Cole 1991;Gruman 1966Gruman [2003; Kass 2004; Moreira and Palladino 2008;Vincent 2006), we are, in a word, ''mortals'' (PCBE 2003a).…”

Section: Death and Agingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Anti-Aging is not Necessarily Anti-Death: Bioethics and the Front Lines of Practice

Mykytyn

2009

Medicine Studies

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Anti-aging medicine has emerged in the past two decades as both a medical practice and scientific objective largely aimed at intervening into the process of aging itself rather than its ''associated'' diseases. This has provoked a both excitement and concern in bioethical deliberations on the meaning and potential impact of an effective intervention. In this article, I examine the different ways in which bioethicists, other social scientists, and anti-aging proponents frame anti-aging goals, in particular, the construction of immortality as its implicit and explicit aim. This research is based upon over 9 years of anthropological, ethnographic interview-and observation-based research in the field and draws substantially from the US President's Council on Bioethics' deliberations on this topic as well as from interview data and other publications/discussion on anti-aging medicine. I argue that while the framework of life and death provide the primary structure for many bioethical and social science critiques of anti-aging medicine, many if not most anti-aging practitioners, researchers, and advocates employ the alternative structure of health and pain to orient their work. These divergent orientations of life/death and health/ pain beget competing conversations around antiaging medicine; including voices from the front lines of anti-aging practice complicate bioethical critiques and ultimately beg different questions. Positioning the painful, physiological decline of aging as the ultimate adversary rather than death challenges traditional models of biomedical intervention based on ''nature'' and ''disease'' constructions.

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“…While medical, preventive and rehabilitative programmes aimed at the elderly disclose an increasing focus on 'good' ageing processes that venture to compress the period of morbidity and potentially postpone old age, these programmes also tell a tale about death. Sociologists Moreira and Palladino (2008) have shown how the biogerontological debate about the nature of death says a lot about how the 'politics of life itself ' (Rose 2007) is played out. However, we reverse this strategy here and explore what medical technologies and health intervention programmes say about death.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

What Enhancement Techniques Suggest about the Good Death

Lassen

Andersen

2016

Cult. Unbound

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The contemporary increase in life expectancy in Western countries has led to an intensified focus on good ageing processes as a way to manage ageing populations. We argue that while qualifications of the ageing process such as active and healthy ageing endeavour to compress morbidity through enhancement techniques, the idea of the good old age also implicitly tells a tale about the 'good' death. We explore how current discourses depict old age as an active, engaged and independent life phase and construct a specific idea of the good death as one that is quick and painless. By engaging with literature on ageing, death and enhancement technologies as well as current Danish healthcare initiatives, we examine the paradoxical, contemporary notion of death as natural, quick, painless and controllable. Danish rehabilitation programmes are provided as an example of specific enhancement techniques that through motivation and physical activity orchestrate the good death in a body that has been as healthy as possible for as long as possible. However, when such techniques become a moral injunction rather than a choice, questions arise concerning the relationship between autonomy and death. We argue that the discursive construction of the good death happens in tandem with enhancement techniques that postpone death, and that this postponement of death has increasingly become more of an imperative than an autonomous decision.

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Squaring the Curve: The Anatomo-Politics of Ageing, Life and Death

Cited by 22 publications

References 69 publications

Ageing, Anti-ageing, and Anti-anti-ageing: Who are the Progressives in the Debate on the Future of Human Biological Ageing?

Ageing, Anti-ageing, and Anti-anti-ageing: Who are the Progressives in the Debate on the Future of Human Biological Ageing?

Anti-Aging is not Necessarily Anti-Death: Bioethics and the Front Lines of Practice

What Enhancement Techniques Suggest about the Good Death

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