Disciplining Old Age: The Formation of Gerontological Knowledge

Laura Davidow Hirshbein From: Bulletin of the History of Medicine Volume 72, Number 3, Fall 1998 pp. 594-595 | 10.1353/bhm.1998.0132

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Laura Davidow Hirshbein

Stephen Katz. Disciplining Old Age: The Formation of Gerontological Knowledge. Knowledge: Disciplinarity and Beyond. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996. x + 209 pp. $45.00. In Disciplining Old Age, Stephen Katz provides a concise, tightly focused critical reading of the major texts and organizations of gerontology, primarily in nineteenth- and twentieth-century America. Using the work of Michel Foucault as a model, Katz inverts the usual trajectory of gerontological history to illustrate the ways in which gerontology as a discipline constructed the subject of old age. As he says about the Foucauldian approach, “Rather than looking at the history of gerontology to discover how knowledge disclosed the problems of old age, we can look at how the subjectification of old age made gerontological knowledge possible” (p. 11). In his introduction, Katz carefully outlines how he intends to use Foucault’s arguments for his critical examination of gerontology, particularly the relationship between disciplines and subjects. Katz describes three ways in which disciplines create subjects: through classification, division, and self-subjectification. Further, he describes three types of subjects: the body, the population, and the individual. Although Katz emphasizes the construction of subjects by disciplines, he does not imply that these subjects have no agency. Instead, he argues that “elderly persons, constructed as bodily, individual, and demographic subjects, also become agents who strategically mobilize political action” (p. 26).

In the remainder of his book, Katz uses specific examples to explore the disciplining of old age. In the first and second chapters, he traces the medicalization of the aging body from premodern times to the present, and the creation of an elderly population through institutions, pensions, and social surveys. In the third and fourth chapters, he examines the medical and popular texts that created a science of old age, and the disciplinary activities of gerontological organizations. In his conclusion, Katz is more than willing to acknowledge that, despite his critical reading of gerontological knowledge, “gerontologists have bettered life in old age” (p. 135). He further argues that postmodern questions about gender, race, class, religion, time, and space will ultimately benefit gerontology: “The conditions of postmodern knowledge have disrupted the modern projects of disciplinary progress and universal representation. But they have also recast criticality as a creative process, consequent on the [End Page 594] continual recombining of plural, dislocated, interdisciplinary fragments. Recombination creates innovation” (pp. 139–40).

Throughout his book, Katz questions traditional assumptions about gerontology, particularly the heroic history of the discipline as the acquisition of knowledge to assist older people. While he uses many of the same texts that other scholars have explored in prior accounts of geriatrics and gerontology—particularly the works of such well-known figures as Elie Metchnikoff, G. Stanley Hall, and E. V. Cowdry—Katz’s reading is unique in that he explores the ways in which these texts constitute the subject matter they are supposed to describe. This work has a few limitations, though. Katz’s analysis is searching and stimulating, but his description of change over time focuses only on broad changes (i.e., on the differences between premodern and modern ideas about old age), and he does not make much of nineteenth- and twentieth-century social, cultural, political, and economic contingencies in the production of gerontological knowledge. He might have deepened his inquiry further by exploring the specific historical contexts in which gerontological texts and organizations were created. In addition, Katz’s text might be difficult for readers who are not familiar with the language of poststructuralist criticism. In the end, however, Disciplining Old Age is a valuable addition to the gerontological literature, and will be useful to scholars interested in a model of constructive uses of Foucauldian theory, as well as to anyone seeking a more critical view on gerontology.

Laura Davidow Hirshbein University of Michigan

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/4115