Elderhood

Elderhood Plot Summary

Introduction

Louise Aronson never intended to become a geriatrician. As a history major who deliberately chose her undergraduate college for its lack of math and science requirements, she seemed an unlikely candidate for medical school, let alone for specializing in the care of older adults. Yet through a series of unexpected encounters and realizations, she found herself increasingly drawn to elderly patients while her colleagues gravitated toward more prestigious specialties. What began as a reluctant career choice evolved into a profound calling that would challenge not only how she practiced medicine but also how she understood the human life cycle itself. Through Aronson's journey, we witness a radical reimagining of what it means to grow old in America. Her experiences reveal how deeply ageism permeates our healthcare system and broader culture, creating barriers to dignified, person-centered care for our oldest citizens. As both physician and writer, Aronson illuminates the disconnect between how medicine approaches aging and how people actually experience it, offering a vision for transforming eldercare that honors the full humanity and continued potential of older adults. Her story invites us to reconsider our own attitudes toward aging, recognizing elderhood not as a period of inevitable decline but as a distinct and valuable life stage with its own developmental tasks, challenges, and opportunities.

Chapter 1: Finding Purpose in Geriatrics: An Unlikely Path

Louise Aronson's journey to geriatrics began with an observation that caught her completely off guard. During her medical residency, a perceptive student remarked, "You love old patients," making Aronson suddenly aware of a pattern she hadn't consciously recognized. This moment of clarity revealed a truth she had been reluctant to acknowledge - she did indeed find particular satisfaction in caring for elderly patients, drawn to their complex medical needs, rich life stories, and the intellectual challenge they presented. In a medical culture that often valued high-tech interventions and dramatic cures over comprehensive care, this preference seemed almost countercultural. Aronson's background hardly suggested a career in medicine, let alone geriatrics. As an undergraduate, she had specifically chosen a college with minimal science requirements, focusing instead on history and literature. Her path to medical school was circuitous, driven more by a desire to make a meaningful difference than by lifelong ambition. Even during her medical training, she kept catalogs from other graduate programs hidden in her dorm room, contemplating alternative paths in fields ranging from public health to English literature. It was only when she began working with actual patients that medicine became what she had hoped for - an opportunity to engage with human stories while making a tangible difference in people's lives. The turning point in Aronson's professional journey came at a geriatrics conference where she attended a lecture on rehabilitation medicine. The speaker, Dr. Ken Brummel-Smith, presented a radical approach that differed fundamentally from what she had been taught. Rather than linking treatment to pathology - the standard medical model - he focused on understanding what each person needed to be happy and safe in their daily life. This patient-centered approach resonated deeply with Aronson, who had grown increasingly frustrated with medicine's tendency to treat diseases rather than people. She realized that geriatrics offered a framework for care that aligned with her values, emphasizing quality of life over simply extending lifespan. Despite finding her calling, Aronson encountered significant resistance within the medical establishment. Geriatrics ranked near the bottom of specialty prestige and compensation, despite requiring additional training beyond internal medicine. Many of her colleagues viewed caring for older adults as depressing or unrewarding, failing to see the intellectual complexity and human richness that Aronson found so compelling. The medical center where she worked didn't even have a dedicated geriatrics department, reflecting the broader marginalization of elder care within healthcare systems designed primarily for younger patients with acute conditions. Nevertheless, Aronson persisted, gradually developing expertise in areas like dementia care, medication management for older adults, and addressing functional limitations. She began giving presentations on geriatric topics, first to fulfill residency requirements, then at major medical conferences. What started as an unexpected affinity evolved into a professional identity and mission - to transform how medicine approaches aging and to advocate for healthcare that respects the dignity and complexity of older adults. Through this journey, Aronson discovered that her most meaningful work lay not in pursuing medicine's most prestigious paths but in serving a population whose needs were often overlooked by the very system designed to help them.

Chapter 2: Seeing the Whole Person: Beyond Disease and Diagnosis

The limitations of conventional medicine became starkly apparent to Aronson through patients like Dimitri Sakovich, a man in his late seventies admitted to a nursing home with what appeared to be end-stage Parkinson's disease and dementia. Upon reviewing his medications, Aronson noticed he was taking ten different drugs, many several times daily. His decline had been rapid - from healthy to bedbound in just a few months. After speaking with his daughter, Aronson realized his deterioration coincided with medication changes. She discovered he had been the victim of a "prescribing cascade" - a common phenomenon where side effects from one medication are treated with additional medications, creating a dangerous cycle. When she stopped eight of his medications and tapered the other two, Dimitri began talking, eating, and moving again. Within six weeks, he transferred to assisted living, resumed painting, and even developed a new romantic relationship. This case exemplified how conventional medicine often fails older patients by focusing on diseases rather than the whole person. In a healthcare system where time is the scarcest resource and care is fragmented among specialists without clear coordination, new symptoms are frequently attributed to age or disease progression rather than to the medications or treatments that actually caused them. The system prioritizes procedures and quick fixes over comprehensive assessment and careful medication management. For Dimitri, this narrow approach had nearly cost him his independence and quality of life. His recovery wasn't the result of a miracle cure but simply of someone taking the time to see the complete picture of his health and life circumstances. Aronson encountered similar patterns with Eva, an elderly woman living alone in a San Francisco apartment atop forty-nine steep stairs. Despite having multiple medical conditions including metastatic cancer, Eva was seeing nine different specialists and making thirty medical center visits annually. Her doctors provided thorough, evidence-based care for their specific areas, but none addressed her most pressing needs: terrible arthritic pain, mobility issues, transportation problems, and social isolation. When Eva finally made it onto Aronson's housecalls practice waitlist, her geriatrician took a completely different approach. Rather than focusing solely on diseases, the doctor elicited Eva's health and life priorities, addressed her pain with safe treatments, simplified her medication schedule, arranged home delivery from the pharmacy, and coordinated care to reduce unnecessary appointments. This comprehensive, person-centered approach exemplifies geriatric medicine's departure from conventional practice. Rather than treating diseases in isolation, geriatricians consider the whole person - their values, environment, social connections, and functional abilities. They recognize that medical problems cannot be separated from their social, political, economic, and cultural contexts, especially for older adults whose needs often fall through the cracks of our fragmented healthcare system. This holistic perspective allows geriatricians to address what matters most to patients, even when those priorities differ from standard medical goals like extending lifespan or eliminating disease. The contrast between disease-centered and person-centered care became particularly evident in Aronson's housecalls practice, where she witnessed patients in their own environments rather than the artificial context of a clinic or hospital. In homes, she could observe not just medical symptoms but also environmental factors affecting health - from steep stairs that limited mobility to family photos that revealed important relationships. She could see whether patients could open their medication bottles, prepare nutritious meals, or maintain personal hygiene. These observations, rarely captured in conventional medical visits, often revealed the true barriers to health and wellbeing that no prescription alone could address. Perhaps most importantly, seeing the whole person meant recognizing that older adults remain full human beings with ongoing potential for growth, meaning, and contribution - not just collections of failing organs or mounting disabilities. Aronson observed how patients who maintained social connections and engaged in meaningful activities demonstrated remarkable resilience even amid physical limitations. This insight led her to incorporate questions about purpose and connection into her clinical assessments, recognizing them as vital signs of wellbeing as important as blood pressure or lab values. As she noted, "The most difficult part of patient care of any kind is dealing with the hardest parts of what it means to be human." Yet these challenging aspects of care are often the most significant and worthwhile experiences in life.

Chapter 3: Challenging Ageism: Medicine's Blind Spot

The pervasiveness of ageism in medicine reveals itself through language, attitudes, and systems of care. When Professor Guy Micco asked his medical students to write down the first words that came to mind when he used the word "old" in reference to a person, their responses were telling: wrinkled, bent over, slow moving, bald, white hair, weak, fragile, feeble, frail, sick. When he repeated the exercise with the word "elder," the responses shifted dramatically: wise, respect, leader, experience, power, money, knowledge. This stark contrast reveals our deeply conflicted cultural attitudes toward aging - attitudes that shape how healthcare professionals approach older patients even before entering the examination room. These biases manifest in countless clinical interactions. Aronson observed how physicians routinely attributed symptoms in older patients to "just getting old" rather than investigating treatable causes. She witnessed elderly patients being excluded from clinical trials based solely on age, despite representing the population most likely to use the medications being studied. Most troublingly, she saw how older adults received less pain medication, fewer preventive services, and less aggressive treatment for conditions like cancer - not based on their preferences or prognosis, but simply because of implicit assumptions about the value of treating someone of advanced age. The medical education system perpetuates these biases through both what it teaches and what it omits. Despite the fact that patients over 65 constitute the majority of hospitalizations and healthcare utilization, geriatrics remains an optional rotation in most medical schools. Students complete required training in pediatrics, obstetrics, and surgery - specialties many will never practice - while receiving minimal instruction in caring for the older adults who will make up a large portion of their future practice. When aging is addressed, it's typically framed as pathology rather than a normal life process, with little attention to distinguishing between disease and the natural changes of aging. Beyond formal education, the hidden curriculum of medical training transmits powerful messages about the value of older patients. In teaching hospitals, Aronson heard elderly patients described in dismissive terms like "gomers" (Get Out of My Emergency Room) or "bed blockers," signaling to trainees that these patients were less valuable or interesting than younger ones. Success was measured by diagnosing rare conditions rather than skillfully managing the complex needs of elderly patients. Faculty rarely challenged these attitudes, and clinical experiences primarily exposed students to older adults during acute crises rather than in settings where their capabilities and personhood would be more evident. The consequences of medical ageism extend beyond individual interactions to shape healthcare systems and policies. Aronson documented how reimbursement structures systematically undervalue the comprehensive, time-intensive care that older adults need, while generously rewarding procedures and interventions that may have limited benefit for frail elders. Hospital environments are designed without consideration for age-related changes in vision, hearing, and mobility, creating settings that actually increase the risk of complications like delirium and functional decline. Even quality metrics often fail to capture what matters most to older patients, focusing on disease-specific outcomes rather than function, quality of life, or alignment with patient goals. Challenging these entrenched biases requires more than individual awareness - it demands systemic change. Aronson advocated for transforming medical education to include geriatrics as a core component, redesigning healthcare environments to accommodate age-related needs, and restructuring payment systems to value comprehensive care. Most fundamentally, she called for recognizing elderhood as a distinct life stage with its own developmental tasks and opportunities, deserving the same consideration in healthcare design as childhood and adulthood. By naming and confronting ageism as medicine's blind spot, Aronson began the essential work of creating healthcare systems that serve people of all ages with equal respect and attention to their unique needs.

Chapter 4: Home vs. Hospital: Where Elders Receive Care

The contrast between home and institutional care environments reveals profound truths about how our society values and treats older adults. Through her housecalls practice, Aronson gained intimate access to her patients' living spaces, observing how these environments both reflected and shaped their identities and capabilities. In their homes, even frail elders maintained a sense of agency and personhood that often disappeared when they crossed the threshold into medical institutions. One 94-year-old woman with significant physical limitations still proudly showed Aronson her carefully tended plants and family photographs, maintaining control over her immediate environment in ways impossible in institutional settings. Hospitals, despite their life-saving capabilities, often function as actively hostile environments for older adults. Aronson documented how standard hospital practices - from round-the-clock disruptions to mobility restrictions and sensory overload - created perfect conditions for complications like delirium, functional decline, and hospital-acquired infections. These iatrogenic harms disproportionately affected older patients, yet were rarely recognized as the preventable consequences of care environments designed without consideration for age-related vulnerabilities. One study Aronson cited found that one-third of patients over 70 left the hospital more disabled than when they entered, regardless of the reason for admission. The story of Neeta, a patient who died after a hip fracture, illustrates the systemic failures in transitional care. After surgery, Neeta was discharged to a low-quality nursing facility where staff managed her delirium with sedating drugs, and she barely ate or began physical therapy. By the time Aronson returned from vacation, Neeta was bedbound with a huge pressure sore, malnutrition, and a wound infection. Her only option became hospice care. What went wrong? At nearly every step, Neeta received care that was typical but not what she needed. Hospitals face pressure to discharge patients quickly, and doctors receive little training in outpatient medicine, geriatrics, or nursing home quality. Neeta's family assumed the hospital doctors and discharge planners would guide them appropriately, not realizing these professionals often know little about the quality or outcomes of local facilities. The nursing home represents perhaps the most feared care environment in American culture, a dread Aronson found was not unfounded. While acknowledging the dedicated staff in many facilities, she observed how institutional imperatives for efficiency and risk management often overrode residents' preferences and dignity. The rigid schedules, lack of privacy, and emphasis on safety above all else created environments that, while physically secure, often diminished residents' sense of meaning and autonomy. As one patient told her: "They keep my body alive but kill everything that makes life worth living." Between home and institution lie various intermediate options that Aronson found promising yet underutilized. Assisted living facilities, continuing care retirement communities, and naturally occurring retirement communities (NORCs) offered potential models for balancing independence with support. However, these options remained inaccessible to many due to high costs and limited availability. The result was a care landscape with few options between complete independence and total institutionalization - a gap that forced many older adults to remain in unsafe home situations or enter nursing homes prematurely. The financial structures underlying elder care further distorted where and how care was delivered. Medicare's generous coverage of hospital care contrasted sharply with minimal support for home-based services, creating perverse incentives that channeled elders into institutions even when home care would be both more effective and more aligned with their preferences. Aronson witnessed countless situations where patients were hospitalized for conditions that could have been managed at home with proper support, or placed in nursing homes because the home care they needed was unaffordable or unavailable.

Chapter 5: The Violence of Standard Care: When Medicine Harms

In medicine, a certain amount of violence is inherent and ubiquitous. Doctors hold power and have license to use physical force. Many medical decisions, procedures, and prescriptions carry a high likelihood of harm or trauma. Yet this reality is rarely acknowledged or examined, particularly when it comes to the care of elderly patients. Aronson courageously confronted this uncomfortable truth, recognizing that acknowledging the potential for harm is the first step toward more compassionate care. Aronson recalled a traumatic experience from her residency days when she was assigned to perform a lumbar puncture on a difficult patient with AIDS. Despite being skilled at the procedure, she struggled to find the right spot between the patient's vertebrae. With each failed attempt, the patient tensed and protested in pain. Aronson found herself suppressing a desire to stab the patient harder, just to get the procedure over with. Her pager kept alarming, other patients needed her attention, and she felt an overwhelming urge to flee the room. When she finally succeeded, the patient remained trembling in a fetal position. Looking at him, Aronson realized she had hurt someone she was meant to help. "In becoming a doctor," she reflected, "I have become a monster. Instead of taking time to ensure his comfort, physically and psychologically, I have used my power, position, and physical strength to get the procedure over and done with." This type of medical violence is particularly common in the treatment of elderly patients, who often receive treatments that cause significant suffering without clear benefits. Aronson described Clarence Williams Sr., a seventy-two-year-old attorney who entered the hospital healthy and active but was decimated by aggressive chemotherapy. The treatment caused ulcers in his mouth and intestines, blistered skin, vomiting, diarrhea, and extreme weakness. When oncologists decided he needed a colonoscopy, he had to endure the humiliation of soiling himself because he was too weak to reach the bathroom in time. In medicine, a colonoscopy is classified as a "minor" procedure, but this designation doesn't take into account the particular circumstances of the patient. For frail elderly patients, such "minor" procedures can cause major suffering. The violence in medical care isn't always physical. It can also manifest in the dismissal of elderly patients' concerns or the assumption that their problems are simply due to age. When an eighty-six-year-old patient named Maria Calderon complained of feeling unstable, Aronson spent months trying various treatments without success. It was only when another doctor saw Maria that she was correctly diagnosed with Parkinson's disease - a condition that's far easier to spot in a healthy sixty-year-old than in a frail, arthritic octogenarian. Similarly, Ray, a one-hundred-year-old patient, was mistakenly thought to have dementia because he gave nonsensical answers to questions. In reality, he was profoundly deaf and had left his hearing aids at home to avoid losing them in the hospital. The hospital team had never considered his hearing and didn't know about the pocket talkers that could have facilitated communication. The story of Patricia Gabow, CEO and chief medical officer of Denver Health, illustrates how standard medical care can fail elderly patients. When her frail ninety-four-year-old mother with advanced dementia injured herself in a fall, Gabow realized the clinical pathways she had implemented in her own health system were not what her mother needed. In fact, they would harm her. As her mother's designated decision-maker, Gabow said no to a neck brace, heart monitor, IV, CT scan, orthopedic surgery, and hospital stay. She opted instead for suturing a forearm gash, a splint for her mother's broken wrist, and nonoperative treatment at home for the hip fracture. The hospital doctors were uncomfortable with these choices, arguing that surgery was quick and minor. But Gabow envisioned a different scenario: an intravenous line her mother would try to remove, leading to restraints, sedation, and a downward spiral that would seem like torture. These examples illustrate how the medical system often fails elderly patients not through malice but through ignorance, time pressure, and a focus on diseases rather than the whole person. The violence may be unintentional, but its impact is no less real for those who experience it. By naming these harms, Aronson began the essential work of creating more humane approaches to elder care - approaches that recognize the potential for harm in even well-intentioned interventions and prioritize what matters most to patients themselves.

Chapter 6: Reimagining Aging: From Decline to Development

Aging begins at birth. In childhood, the changes are dramatic and celebrated as development. But after our twenties, aging seems to abate, taking on the imperceptible pace of hair growth or melting glaciers. Yet the changes continue throughout life - physically, functionally, and psychologically. At some point, we cross into "middle age" and discover that aging isn't just a characteristic of that mythical land called "old." This recognition that aging is a lifelong process rather than a condition that suddenly afflicts us in later life formed the foundation of Aronson's reimagining of elderhood. The prevailing narratives about aging present it as a relentless downward trajectory, a "massacre" rather than a battle, as Philip Roth famously described it. Yet Aronson's experiences with patients revealed a more complex reality - one where aging brought not just losses but also new forms of freedom, wisdom, and even happiness. Research consistently showed that contrary to popular belief, older adults reported higher levels of well-being than their middle-aged counterparts. Studies found that anxiety peaked between ages thirty-five and fifty-nine, then dropped markedly in the early sixties, falling to its lowest levels after age sixty-five. Even those over ninety reported greater happiness than the middle-aged. As poet Mary Ruefle observed, "You should never fear aging because you have absolutely no idea the absolute freedom in aging; it's astounding and mind-blowing." This freedom manifested in multiple ways. With advancing age, many people became less concerned with others' opinions and more authentic in their self-expression. They developed greater emotional intelligence and psychological resilience. Having weathered life's inevitable disappointments and losses, they gained perspective that allowed them to focus on what truly mattered. The anthropologist Margaret Clark found that healthy older adults adapted to aging by embracing values like congeniality, wise use of resources, and calm self-acceptance, rather than clinging to middle-aged norms of power, status, and recognition. Aronson came to understand that successful adaptation to aging wasn't about denying changes but about continuously revising one's identity to integrate past and present selves. As the medical anthropologist Sharon Kaufman noted, "The old Americans I studied do not perceive meaning in aging itself; rather, they perceive meaning in being themselves in old age." This process of identity maintenance and reconstruction allowed people to find purpose and satisfaction even as their physical capabilities changed. Aronson observed this in patients like Frank, a 92-year-old who initially wanted to die after losing his wife and independence, but who found renewed purpose through relationships with caregivers and fellow residents in his assisted living facility. The concept of legacy emerged as increasingly significant in Aronson's reimagining of aging. She observed how many older adults naturally turned toward generativity - the desire to contribute to future generations and leave something meaningful behind. This manifested differently across individuals: some through grandparenting or mentoring, others through creative work or community service, still others through life review and storytelling. What united these diverse expressions was the desire to create meaning that extended beyond the individual life span - to be part of something larger and more enduring than oneself. By reimagining aging as a distinct developmental stage rather than merely extended adulthood marked by decline, Aronson offered a framework that honored both the challenges and opportunities of later life. This perspective shift had profound implications for healthcare, suggesting that medical approaches should focus not just on extending life or treating disease but on supporting the developmental tasks specific to elderhood - from life review and meaning-making to adapting to changing capabilities and preparing for life's end. It also challenged broader social structures to create environments where older adults could continue to grow, contribute, and find purpose rather than being marginalized or infantilized.

Chapter 7: Creating Systems that Honor Age

Throughout her career, Aronson witnessed how healthcare systems consistently failed older adults. From emergency departments where elderly patients were misdiagnosed because doctors didn't understand normal aging, to hospitals where their basic needs for mobility and orientation were ignored, to nursing homes that resembled prisons more than homes, the infrastructure of American healthcare seemed designed for everyone except its most frequent users. Creating systems that truly honor age would require fundamental changes at multiple levels. Medical education needed transformation. Despite the fact that most doctors regularly treat elderly patients, geriatrics remains an optional subject in most medical schools. Students complete required rotations in pediatrics, obstetrics, and surgery - specialties many will never practice - while receiving minimal training in caring for the older adults who will constitute a large portion of their future practice. Aronson advocated replacing the centuries-old "adult-as-norm" model with an equally weighted "child-adult-elder" lens that would prepare doctors to provide appropriate care across the entire human lifespan. This educational shift would ensure that all physicians, regardless of specialty, understood the unique physiological, pharmacological, and functional considerations relevant to older patients. Healthcare financing needed restructuring to value the care that matters most to older adults. The current system rewards procedures, hospitalizations, and disease-specific interventions while undervaluing the comprehensive, coordinated care that helps elderly patients maintain function and quality of life. Aronson described how her housecalls practice saved the healthcare system tens of thousands of dollars by preventing hospitalizations, yet these savings never appeared on the medical center's balance sheet because inpatient and outpatient budgets remained separate. A truly age-friendly system would align financial incentives with patient outcomes rather than service volume, rewarding providers for maintaining function and independence rather than simply treating diseases. Physical environments needed redesign to accommodate aging bodies. Aronson described the stark contrast between her hospital's new "next-generation" facility, with its natural light and interactive features, and the geriatric unit on the fifteenth floor of the old hospital, with its harsh lighting, lack of orientation cues, and absence of rest areas in long corridors. Even assisted living facilities marketed to older adults often prioritized aesthetics over the social engagement and purposeful activities that research showed were essential for wellbeing in later life. Creating age-friendly environments meant designing spaces that supported orientation, mobility, sensory engagement, and social connection rather than merely looking attractive in marketing materials. Technology needed development with older users in mind. While Aronson acknowledged the potential benefits of innovations like robot caregivers for isolated elderly people, she cautioned that technology should supplement rather than replace human care. Too often, tech designed for older adults focused on monitoring and control rather than empowerment and connection, reflecting society's tendency to infantilize rather than respect its eldest members. Age-friendly technology would be designed with and for older adults, addressing their actual needs and preferences rather than imposing solutions based on stereotypes or convenience for caregivers. Perhaps most fundamentally, building systems that honor age required challenging the cultural assumptions that devalue later life. Aronson proposed reclaiming the term "elderhood" to recognize old age as a distinct and valuable life stage alongside childhood and adulthood. This wasn't just a matter of terminology but of recognizing that older adults deserve the same consideration in policy, healthcare, and community design as any other age group. By naming and honoring elderhood, Aronson sought to create a conceptual framework that could guide the development of more supportive and respectful systems across all domains of society. Through her writing, teaching, and clinical innovation, Aronson worked to create models of what age-friendly healthcare could look like. After her burnout experience, she developed a new clinic that would approach elderhood the way pediatricians approach childhood - combining disease management with function-based care and health promotion. This integrative approach represented her vision of systems that don't just treat the diseases of aging but support the full potential of human life in its third act.

Summary

Louise Aronson's exploration of elderhood reveals a fundamental truth: our third act of life contains as much potential for growth, meaning, and contribution as our earlier stages, yet remains profoundly misunderstood and undervalued in contemporary society. Through her dual perspective as both physician and aging human, she illuminates how medicine's disease-focused approach fails to address the complex realities of older adults' lives, while cultural ageism diminishes what could be a rich and purposeful life stage. Her vision for transforming both healthcare and cultural attitudes toward aging centers on recognizing elderhood as a distinct developmental period with its own tasks and opportunities rather than merely an extension of adulthood marked by decline. The insights Aronson offers extend far beyond medicine to challenge how we all think about and prepare for our later years. By reframing aging as a natural process that brings both losses and gains rather than a problem to be solved or denied, she invites readers to imagine different possibilities for their own aging journey. Her work suggests that the path forward requires both systemic changes in how healthcare and society support older adults and personal shifts in how we conceptualize aging itself. For healthcare professionals, her message calls for more holistic approaches that honor the full humanity of older patients; for individuals of all ages, she offers a more hopeful vision of elderhood as a time of continued growth, meaningful connection, and unique contributions to our shared human experience.

About Author

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Louise Aronson

Louise Aronson is a writer, leading geriatrician, educator, professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) and the author of the New York Times bestseller Elderhood: Redefining Aging, Transforming Medicine, and Reimagining Life. A graduate of Harvard Medical School and the Warren Wilson Program for Writers, 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. Her writing appears in publications including The New York Times, Washington Post, Discover Magazine, JAMA, Bellevue Literary Review and the New England Journal of Medicine and has earned her four Pushcart nominations, the Sonora Review Prize, and a MacDowell fellowship. Her work has been featured on TODAY, CBS This Morning, NPR’s Fresh Air, Politico, LitHub, Kaiser Health News, and Tech Nation.

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