Lewis County Home, Lowville, New York: An Historical Sketch of a Home for the Aged, 1824-1950
Abstract
There probably has never been a time in the history of social welfare work when the caring for the aged was not one of its major problems. In times past only the exceptionally strong withstood the hardships of their environment and the lack of health care. The relatively few persons who survived and reached old age usually could find a place in the comparatively slow moving economy where they could tinker away at some job by which they could be self-supporting. If not this, they could spend their last years in the homes of their children. Today, through the developments of medical science and geriatrics, the span of human life has changed. The average man lives longer and works longer, but he also spends more years in retirement from active participation in the affairs of the world. The economic revolution of the past half century has reconstructed our way of living. In this mechanized era, aged persons have much greater difficulty in finding places in which they can earn a livelihood than in the simpler economy of the past, when their number was relatively small. Our new way of living has produced a new pattern of family life. Today, few elderly persons can live helpfully and with a reasonably degree of privacy in the homes of their children.
Subject Area
Health care management|Social work|Aging
Recommended Citation
Sturtz, John Raymond, "Lewis County Home, Lowville, New York: An Historical Sketch of a Home for the Aged, 1824-1950" (1952). ETD Collection for Fordham University. AAI30557672.
https://research.library.fordham.edu/dissertations/AAI30557672
