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Robert Neil Butler (January 21, 1927 – July 4, 2010) was an American physician, gerontologist, psychiatrist, and author, who was the first director of the National Institute on Aging. Butler is known for his work on the social needs and the rights of the elderly and for his research on healthy aging and the dementias.

Background

Having grown up with his grandparents in Vineland, New Jersey,[1][2] Butler was shocked by the dismissive and contemptuous attitude toward the elderly and their diseases by many of his teachers at medical school, an attitude he later characterized as "ageism".

He graduated from Columbia College of Columbia University, where he was editor of the Columbia Daily Spectator and a member of the Philolexian Society.

Career

Butler was a principal investigator of one of the first interdisciplinary, comprehensive, longitudinal studies of healthy community-residing older persons, conducted at the National Institute of Mental Health (1955–1966), which resulted in the landmark book Human Aging. His research helped establish the fact that senility was not inevitable with aging, but is a consequence of disease.

In 1969, he coined the term ageism to describe discrimination against seniors; the term was patterned on sexism and racism.[5] Butler defined "ageism" as a combination of three connected elements. Among them were prejudicial attitudes towards older people, old age, and the aging process; discriminatory practices against older people; and institutional practices and policies that perpetuate stereotypes about elderly people.

In 1975, he became the founding Director[7] of the National Institute on Aging (NIA) of the National Institutes of Health, where he remained until 1982. At the National Institute on Aging he established Alzheimer's disease as a national research priority.

In 1982, he founded the Department of Geriatrics and Adult Development at the Mount Sinai Medical Center, the first department of geriatrics in a United States medical school.[9] In addition, Butler helped found the Alzheimer's Disease Association, the American Association of Geriatric Psychiatry, the American Federation for Aging Research and the Alliance for Aging Research.

Butler was the founder, chief executive officer, and president of the International Longevity Center-USA,[11] a non-profit international organization created to educate people on how to live longer and better.[12] The International Longevity Center-USA is now housed at the Robert N. Butler Columbia Aging Center, a university-wide center of Columbia University based at the Mailman School of Public Health

Publications

Butler is best known for his 1975 book Why Survive? Being Old In America, which won the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction in 1976.

Courtesy – Wikipedia
- N Butler

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