Geriatrics and Older People in Japan

promoter and the first President of the Spanish Society of Gerontology when it was founded in 1948. From 1946 to the mid-1950s, he organized several postgraduate medical courses, which probably were the first official courses on geriatrics in any European School of Medicine. This fact was acknowledged during the IV World Congress of the IAG, which took place in Merano-Venice in the summer of 1957. The number of physicians registered in the first course in 1946 was 130. Notwithstanding this forerunner, the first geriatric chair in a Spanish School of Medicine was not established until 1999 in the Universidad Complutense (Madrid). The ‘‘Revista Espanola de Geriatria y Gerontologia’’ (Spanish Journal of Geriatrics and Gerontology) was born in 1966. Since then it has continuously been the most significant journal of our specialty written in Spanish, with a high acceptance both in Spain and in Latin American countries. In closing, I would like to make another brief historical remark to highlight that interest in geriatrics and biogerontology in Latin American countries is also very old. In Argentina, Nobel Prize winner Bernardo Houssay worked and published research papers in these areas in the 1940s. His name appears in Nathan Shock’s book quoted by Morley. Several medical professors of the Buenos Aires School of Medicine founded the Argentinean Society of Geriatrics in 1953. And, in the last half century, the number of geriatrics activities has been continuously increasing in many other Latin American countries, whose national societies, in some cases, notably Chile, Venezuela, Mexico, Brazil, and Peru, are all approaching their 50th anniversary.