Abstract
There can be a rich exchange of information and techniques between gerontologists and oral historians working with the elderly. Oral history provides a way of making concrete one's experiences and wisdom and of creating from them a heritage to hand down to one's family and communal heirs. There are great therapeutic benefits or enhancement-of-life benefits to the narrators doing an oral history. Benefits are directly in proportion to how rigorous a historical effort it is, and therefore, the less “therapeutic” the goal, the more therapeutic the result will be.
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