Abstract
An attempt to relate Shakespeare's portrayal of old people in his plays to the modern science of geriatrics necessitates research into the medical background of Shakespeare's day. During his lifetime, the science of medicine was being actively formulated. |This 16th and 17th century saw the development of not only anatomy, the basic science of medicine, but also of pathology, the basic science of disease, and physiology, the basic science of health. |Men were doing supremely great things in every department of human thought. This was true also in medicine and we have a number of men whose names are forever memorable for what they accomplished for medical advance. |These men include Vesalius, the greatest single contributor to scientific medicine in this Renaissance period; Paracelsus and.Pare, respectively physician and surgeon, the two great practical medical scientists of the sixteenth century; and Shakespeare's two countrymen, Linacre, the founder of the Royal College of Physicians, and John Caius, the founder of Caius' College in Cambridge, both of whom left the impression of their personalities on English-speaking medicine at the beginning of the sixteenth century