Extract
Finbarr Martin
Paul Knight
Congratulations to Age and Ageing on reaching 40: for surviving the birth pangs of a new journal; the teenage years finding a direction; emerging as a secure fixture on the academic landscape with the confidence of readers and researchers in UK and now a world player, having earned authority and respect among peers in the wider world of gerontology.
Age and Ageing arose from the need of doctors collectively to develop the knowledge and understanding needed for a new type of clinical practice, geriatric medicine. Within just a few decades this need has gone global. And this expansion is reflected in the ever broadening source of its articles and base of its readership. But expansion has happened in other ways too. Early volumes document the intellectual development of the clinical practitioners: categorisation of the problems, exploring the differences from ‘classical’ medical truths, developing new methods and approaches. Documenting atypical presentations of disease of patients—who had neglected to read the textbooks before falling ill—was the vital discovery that enabled medicine to come to the assistance of discarded older citizens, for whom custodial or at best only social care responses to the geriatric syndromes were offered. The mental test score, so basic yet so essential, became almost the clarion call of the 1970s and 1980s geriatricians.
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