Rheumatism, lumbago, varicose veins, calcified arteries, compensated for by enlargement of the heart, its valvular leaks and weakness, high abnormal blood pressure, adiposity or progressive emaciation, shaking palsy, cramps, bronchitis, asthma, shortness of breath, gout, stone, Bright’s disease, diabetes, constipation, piles, hernia, prostate troubles, tuberculosis, cancer, dyspepsias, flatulence, nausea, vertigo, flaccid and atrophied pudenda, feeble voice, defective sleep, failing eyesight and hearing, weakness of muscles, gaps in dentition, rather more hygienic than the complete edentate state; and beyond all these and many more the certain prospect of death just ahead or around the corner, liable to come from many of these causes or from any one of them already so well advanced that to know is no longer to prevent it--these are the things the old face if they have the courage not to flee from real facts. One or more of these maladies is sure to strangle, starve, bleed, poison, or paralyze us suddenly or slowly, and that ere long. Some of us will die from the top down with dementia more or less developed, while for others some vegetative organ will collapse and drag down with it all the rest of our powers, which might otherwise go on for a decade or two. These are the things that often make the old pessimistic. They are the secrets of age that must be kept from the young lest they interfere with their joy of life and which religion and philosophy have done their best from the beginning of history to mitigate. Thus the soul of the old, when it confronts the sternest of all facts at close quarters, grows more and more prone to seek diversion than consolation, for the former in fact is the chief resource of senescence although, as I shall indicate later, modern science is slowly evolving a third and better one. Meanwhile, since medicine is far from having yet developed any systematic or coherent gerontology, although it has marshaled many facts and given us many hints toward such a science, it has seemed to me that in the present state of knowledge I can serve the reader better by epitomizing, without any attempt at systematization that would be certainly premature, the _aperçus_ and the standpoints of those who seem to me in recent years to have written more wisely than others upon this theme, as follows. The only attempt at a history of what medicine has done for old age that I can find is in an old book by Charcot[143] in which he attempts to list and characterize the far too few studies of any importance made upon the subject up to that date. He urges that medical science should give far more attention to it.