NotNormativelyHuman 227
Charcot marks a milestone not only in the medical, but also the
cultural history of late life. Not only did he (as the title indicates)
systematize and normalize the relation between late life and illness, he
also told his readerswhereto look for "age": among them the poor, the
mentally ill,andwomen:"Here...iswhereweshallfindthematerials
which will serve us in making a clinical history of affections of the
senileperiodoflife"(Charcotqtd.inKatz,DiscipliningOldAge17).Of
course, Charcot did not suggest that only the "lower classes" get older,
but he directed the "age gaze" to people at the periphery of bourgeois
society. The link thus forged between bodily norms and social class are
very much with us, even today, as Laura Kipnis notes: "the transcoding
between the body and the social sets up the mechanisms through which
the body is the privileged trope of lower social classes.. ." (qtd. in
Jameson"'CulturalStudies'"38).
Charcot's pioneering work, while grounding "age" in the materiality
ofthebody,didsoinwaysthatnolongerreflectthestateofknowledge
about late life embodiment. As Jones and Higgs have shown,
"[p]reviously taken for granted expectations of a natural life course,
following stable and culturally normal stages ending in infirmity and
eventually death, have been transformed by environmental, social and
bio-medical developments" (1513). Not only have notions of the
"natural" order of life been destabilized, advances in biomedicine have
brought about "an increasingly differentiated idea of normal ageing"
(Jones and Higgs 1513). Especially Charcot's reliance on scopic
evidence, also most of his indicators which hone in on disease and
decay,arenowperceivedasmisguided.MostillnesseslistedbyCharcot
are not typical of or "normal" in the older body, they are common
occurrencesatallstagesofthelifecourse.Eventhoughlaterbiomedical
researchwouldmodifysomeofhisinsights,Charcot'sworknevertheless
attained "importance as a modelfor future research in the United States
far beyond its actual merits" (Achenbaum,OldAge43). From the point
ofviewofculturalcritique,thiscertainlywasaninauspiciousbeginning
forgerontologybecauseitgavescientificcredencetoprevailingpopular
beliefs—mucholderthanCharcot'sresearch—thatgrowingoldermeans
becoming a non-normative human being. Whereas in pre-modern times
"oldage"hadforthemostpartbeenregardedaspartofthenaturalorder
which did not require special and specialist attention, in the wake of its
biomedicalization in EuroAmerican modernity, "age" became an