Join Class of 1980 for a presentation of “ Elderhood: Redefining Aging, Transforming Medicine, Reimagining Life” by Dr. Louise Aronson ’86.
"Exquisitely written . . . [Aronson] advocates a new paradigm: a re-balancing act in which technology has a role but the focus returns to care. Unlike the high-tech, algorithmic march of modern medicine, her idea of truly ‘personalized medicine’ incorporates the patient’s past experiences and current expectations. This integrative, humanistic model of geriatrics is rare. One can only hope its practices are adopted swiftly." – Nature
With ELDERHOOD, Aronson urges us to re-examine the meaning of aging and to reframe our later decades. In vivid and evocative writing, she speaks to doctors and lay-people, the aged and aging, their children and their children—anyone who will be old one day, which in theory is all of us.
Louise Aronson (Brown ’86), MD MFA, author of the story collection A History of the Present Illness, is a geriatrician, educator, and professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), where she directs UCSF Health Humanities. A graduate of Harvard Medical School and the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, Dr. Aronson has received the Gold Professorship in Humanism in Medicine, the California Homecare Physician of the Year award, and the American Geriatrics Society Clinician-Teacher of the Year award.
Following Dr. Aronson’s presentation, she will be joined in conversation with Rachel Balaban ’80. Rachel is founder of DAPpers, Dance for All People, a multigenerational dance class for people with Parkinson’s disease and other movement challenges. As Teaching Associate at Brown University’s Warren Alpert Medical School and Dance for PD Coordinator for Connecticut and Rhode Island, Rachel helps people access their vitality and health through using their own bodies and helps make dance accessible to all populations.