Three titles give you an idea of what a remarkable man Robert Butler, M.D., was.

Dr. Butler coined the word, “ageism.” He wrote: “The Longevity Revolution: The Benefits and Challenges of Living a Long Life“; “Why Survive?: Being Old in America“; and “The New Love and Sex After 60.”  He was active in public policy for years, leading the way in too many positions to name here.

Considered to be the father of gerontology, Dr. Butler, died unexpectedly on July 4, even as he began a new job and was in a new relationship.

An excerpt from Time Magazine’s elegant appreciation is below. We have taken the liberty of quoting more extensively than usual because the writer did this man justice.

Please go to Time’s website and read the full article.

Remember his name. Aging in American would be today far different than it is without him.

Whatever age you are as you read this, Dr. Butler was your doctor, too.

You just may not know it yet.

Time Magazine

Robert Butler was only 83 when he died. That might seem like a respectable age — indeed, it exceeds the average life expectancy of a white American man by 6½ years — but Butler, the prominent gerontologist, psychiatrist and founder of the U.S. International Longevity Center (ILC), a New York City–based nonprofit dedicated to promoting healthy aging, was nowhere near ready to go. He was looking forward to working “indefinitely,” he said in June, just a few weeks before his unexpected death from leukemia on July 4. He had recently accepted a professorship at Columbia University and was planning to bring the ILC to the campus with him. “It’s kind of fun for me, because I went to Columbia College, Columbia Medical, School and now I wind up as a professor at Columbia,” he said. We were sitting in his office at the ILC, where there was a photograph, taken just a few years earlier, of the wiry Butler posing in the plank position. “It might have been more fun if I’d balanced on one arm,” he said.

For a serious man who left a substantial legacy, fun featured surprisingly often in his discourse. He campaigned vigorously against ageism — and in 1968 coined the term itself, which gained wider currency when a young Carl Bernstein quoted Butler on ageism on the front page of the Washington Post — but deployed a gentle wit to tackle the misconceptions and sheer ignorance fueling age prejudice. As he grew older, he became his own, and most eloquent, argument against ageism, visible proof that the elderly can be as productive, engaged, open to ideas and, yes, fun, as younger folk. “Strictly speaking, longevity is measured in numbers: it is the arithmetical accumulation of days, weeks, months and years that produces our chronological life,” he wrote in his latest book, The Longevity Prescription, published only last month. “Yet aging — or, more accurately, its converse, staying young — is in no small measure a state of mind that defies measurement.” Butler attributed his own apparent healthy aging at least in part to his optimistic outlook.”

Source: Time Magazine, July 7, 2010