Medicine and Society: The Reinvention of Old Age

Please join the UVA Center for Health Humanities and Ethics for a John F. Anderson Memorial Lecture featuring James Gregory Chappel, PhD, Gilhuly Family Associate Professor of History at Duke University, in conversation with Dr. Justin Mutter of the University of Virginia School of Medicine for a conversation about Professor Chapel's latest book, Golden Years: How Americans Invented and Reinvented Old Age. Refreshments will be served. The UVA Bookstore will offer books for sale with an opportunity to purchase signed copies. With gratitude to Don and Gloria Pippin for sponsoring this and other community learning events.

On farms and in factories, Americans once had little choice but to work until death. As the nation prospered, a new idea was born: the right to a dignified and secure old age. That project has benefited millions, but it remains incomplete-and today it's under siege.

In Golden Years, historian James Chappel shows how old age first emerged as a distinct stage of life and how it evolved over the last century, shaped by politicians' choices, activists' demands, medical advancements, and cultural models from utopian novels to The Golden Girls. Only after World War II did government subsidies and employer pensions allow people to retire en masse. Just one generation later, this model crumbled. Older people streamed back into the workforce, and free-market policymakers pushed the burdens of aging back onto older Americans and their families. We now confront an old age mired in contradictions: ever longer lifespans and spiraling health-care costs, 401(k)s and economic precarity, unprecedented opportunity and often disastrous instability.

James Chappel is the Gilhuly Family Associate Professor of History at Duke University and a senior fellow at the Duke Aging Center. He attended Haverford College, where he received a BA in History, and Columbia University for a PhD in History. His prizewinning first book, Catholic Modern: The Challenge of Totalitarianism and the Remaking of the Church, was published in 2018. Golden Years: How Americans Invented and Reinvented Old Age will be published by Basic Books in November 2024. In addition to many academic venues, his writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Nation, and the New Republic.

This program is in partnership with UVA's Center for Health Humanities & Ethics.