# Imagination and idealism after the COVID-19 pandemic: the science of healthy ageing

## TL;DR

The paper discusses how medical science should refocus on combating biological ageing after the end of the COVID-19 pandemic.

## Contribution

It highlights the shift from treating individual diseases to targeting biological ageing, inspired by Herter's ideas on medical imagination and idealism.

## Key findings

- Advanced age is a major risk factor for both severe COVID-19 and chronic diseases.
- Medical science should prioritize targeting biological ageing rather than individual pathologies.
- Herter's distinction between humanitarian and curiosity-driven medicine is relevant for post-pandemic health strategies.

## Abstract

On 5 May 2023, the World Health Organization declared that COVID-19 no longer constituted a public health emergency of international concern. Medical science must now consider how it ought to recalibrate its imagination and idealism in a post-COVID-19 pandemic world. The fact that advanced age was the largest risk factor for COVID-19 mortality and serious illness, as well as for the most prevalent chronic diseases, reveals the urgency and significance of shifting the focus from mitigating each specific pathology risk, one at a time, to targeting biological ageing itself. In his 1910 JAMA Address entitled ‘Imagination and Idealism in the Medical Sciences', Christian Herter made an important distinction between two ways imagination and idealism can be invoked in the medical sciences: (i) humanitarian medicine, which emphasizes the obvious and direct paths of ameliorating human suffering; and (ii) a curiosity-oriented approach which explores pure science and the experimental laboratory. The latter examines the indirect ways of winning, in Herter's words, ‘the citadel’ of health promotion. Herter's reflections on these two contrasting approaches to medicine have significance for both the COVID-19 pandemic and the aspiration to promote the ideal of healthy ageing in the post-COVID-19 pandemic era.