Monday, March 19, 2012

Original text of Review of "Mortal Coil; A Brief History of Living Longer" by David Boyd Haycock for TLS

Submitted 31/01/09

There was quite a lot of editing on this, will try and put up the published text too.

Mortal Coil – A Short History of Living Longer.
David Boyd Haycock
Yale University Press,
2008.


In March 1626, Sir Francis Bacon stopped his carriage to stuff a
chicken with snow. In so doing, he contracted the bronchitis that
would kill him. This experiment was intended to investigate a
potential means of immortality. Bacon, four years earlier, had written
his History Naturall and Experimentall of Life and Death, intended as
manual of the prolongation of life. This age-old ambition assumed more
urgency in the early modern era, as humanists began to question the
received authority that three score and ten was the limit of human
existence. Reports, utterly unencumbered by any documentary evidence,
of centenarians such as Thomas Parr who died allegedly aged 152 in
1635, further encouraged efforts at life extension.

The biblical patriarchs provided most inspiration for would-be
immortalists. Genesis reported that Adam lived to 930, Noah to 950 and
Methuselah to 969. St Augustine and Flavius Josephus had robustly
defended the literal nature of these ages, and in the early modern era
they served as exemplars of human potential. Clearly something had
gone wrong since Genesis, and what becomes a familiar cast of villains
as Haycock's narrative progresses were indicted – faulty diet, alcohol
lack of moral fibre, excess emission of seminal fluid, and so on. Two
distinct approaches to longevity are evident throughout the book – one
of lifestyle modification and one of seeking an elixir of eternal
youth.

For eternal youth, rather than prolonged age per se, was and is the
dream. Aristotle has held that as one ages, the body's life-giving
heat gradually dries out the organs and the flesh. Heat was both
source of life and source of death. For early moderns, reconciling
this with the longevity of the patriarchs was a challenge. For some,
it lead into millennial despair – the world was growing old and
decrepit and humanity along with it. For others, it was a source of
optimism, suggesting that prolonged, vigorous life was possible. This
optimism, fed also by occasional cases like Parr's, survived into more
secular ages sceptical and then dismissive of scriptural authority.


Haycock traces this search from early modernity right up to the
present day. The potential immortality of the soul is outside his
scope. Dreams of longevity are closely linked with other utopian
dreams – witness the interest of such figures as Condorcet and William
Godwin. The cast of characters is huge, and range from figures central
to Western thought such as Descartes (who believed he could live for
five hundred years) to obscure charlatans and eccentrics. Despite
this, there is a pedestrian quality to the book. Some of the curiously
limits of the human imagination when it comes to possible means of
prolonging life. As Haycock describes yet another scheme for longer
life, usually consisting of a simple diet, celibacy, sleep, frugality
and refraining from anything that could be described as excitement,
one feels like one has been here before.

There are exceptions to this rule. Francis Bacon, in his complicated
scheme, encouraged consumption of rich fatty meats, sweat fruits and
honey. The idea that red wine bestows health is not a new one
conveniently discovered by French epidemiologists – in 1638 the London
physician Tobias Whitaker wrote The Tree of Humane Life hoping to
prove "the possibilitie of maintaining Life from infancy to extreame
old age without any sicknesse by the use of Wine." Cryogenics, based
on the idea of refrigerating the corpse for thawing out at a later
date when medical science has obligingly discovered how to reverse the
thousand natural shocks flesh is heir to.

The unintended consequences of the search for long life are often more
interesting than the search itself. Haycock traces the roots of the
Royal Society to Bacon's proposed establishment of Saloman's House, an
institution devoted to the long-term advancement of learning. Modern
endocrinology developed in part as a by product of the search for a
"magic bullet" of longevity. The early twentieth century attempts to
use testosterone to rejuvenate – such as Serge Voronoff's grafting of
monkey testes onto human ones, and Eugen Steinach's use of vasectomies
– attracted much public attention, and mockery. W.B. Yeats submitted
himself to Steinach's procedure followed by hormonal injections in
1934. Dublin wags dubbed him "the gland old man", perhaps confusing
Steinach and Voronoff.

In the final chapter, Haycock brings us to the contemporary world of
genomics and a modern medicine that has unravelled many of life's
secrets and , in the Western world anyway, can sometimes seem capable
of the miraculous. We meet Aubrey de Grey, celebrity posthumanist and
possessor of a beard of Dostoyevkesyian proportions (free of grey
hairs.) de Grey enthusiastically believes there is a human being
currently alive who will live a thousand years. This will be an
incremental process – as the centuries progress, means of prolonging
vigorous life for another twenty years or so will be discovered,
rather then there being one great discovery revealing the key to long
life. de Grey is far from a mainstream figure, and other
gerontologists are profoundly sceptical of the possibility and
desirability of such long life.

Fully engaging in these debates is outside Haycock's scope (and in a
footnote he intimates a belief that the danger of environmental
catastrophe far outweighs the problems of a vastly older population)
but one feels that if he had considered them more explicitly, the book
itself would possess more vigorous life. In the index we find a host
of eminent medical and philosophical names (almost all male, despite –
or maybe because of – the well known tendency for women to live longer
than men) but not that of Alois Alzheimer. All utopian dreams have
within them the stuff of nightmare, and long life is no different.