The Art of Aging

I guess we are all aging but we don't usually pay a great deal of attention to the subject.  When it is our birthday, maybe especially on birthdays that include a zero, we are happy and proud to be old enough to join, leave, brag, or whatever.

The next book in the group I am going through is "The Art of Aging" by Sherwin Nuland.  Nuland was a professor of surgery at Yale and he is the author of this book, and "How We Die", "How We Live" and many other books.  I am using two Kindle readers to track through my collection of 40 recent purchases.  Even though I planned to get through them all before buying anything more, I haven't.  

I saw in a Goodreads email that a book called "Educated" was very popular.  That didn't sound like a novel so I looked it up.  Tara Westover was born in Idaho to a survivalist family which didn't believe in public schooling.  Westover eventually got schooled and went on to obtain a PhD in history from Cambridge University in England, where she now lives.  I bought "Educated" but it will not be released by Amazon until later in this month.  I looked up Westover in Twitter and saw that she has praised a novel called "Why Be Happy When You Can Be Normal?".  I bought that book, too.  I have read a little of it and found that is a story that somewhat parallels Westover's life.  

When I got back to the set of 40, I returned to "The Art of Aging."  Following my own advice, I looked up Dr. Nuland.  I thought I had read that he died and I was checking.  He was born in 1930 and died in 2014.  While looking that up, I found that Nuland made a couple of TED (https://www.ted.com/) talks.  One of them is about how electric shock therapy saved his life.  I have read the electric shock therapy has recently been quite improved so I was interested.  Nuland was an expert in the history of medicine, ancient and recent both.  TED talks usually include a transcript of what is said and a 22 minute talk like his can be read quickly instead of being watched and listened to.  

Nuland was in his 30's when he fell into a deep and debilitating depression while going through a painful and nasty divorce.  He explains in his talk where electric shock therapy came from and why.  He didn't say anything much about improvements but it certainly helped him.