Heritages of science history in the gerontological discussion on multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary perspectives

Since the beginning of the nineteenth century, the history of science in modern Germany has been characterized by a development going in opposite directions. The old scientific disciplines with their traditional Gestus of knowledge acquisition are in contrast to new sciences resulting from external pressures, combining and mobilizing different areas of knowledge, which challenge former dominances and help to establish new open disciplines. However, gerontology in Germany is in this respect a clear latecomer and can only cast off the impact of medicine in the twentieth century to some extent. This article describes this process by the superposition of different lines of tradition, which have longterm effects reaching into the history of the early Federal Republic of Germany.