A monkey business

‘To philosophise,’ Montaigne once wrote, ‘is to learn to die.’ He was paraphrasing Cicero and making an ancient point — only by leading examined lives can we reconcile ourselves to the inevitability of our deaths. The legendary sanguinity of philosophers such as Socrates and Epicurus on their deathbeds seems to bear witness to the truth of the aphorism. In Mortal Coil, however, David Boyd Haycock has written a compelling history of man’s scientific search for longer life, one that reminds us of the many enlightened minds who wanted more than the consolations of philosophy.

Setting aside questions of the immortal soul, this brief study details the search for physical longevity and immortality in the context of western science and medicine from the 17th century to the present. These dates may loosely bookend an age of reason but this volume shows that man’s ceaseless and fumbling search for long life is driven by an impulse that is as old as Gilgamesh.

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Boyd Haycock’s account begins with the Great Instauration, a movement led by Sir Francis Bacon to overthrow the system of learning derived from the ancients with new scholarship based on empiricism. Bacon’s latter work was greatly driven by the goal of achieving physical longevity and he believed the scientific revolution would continue on to test the ‘power and compasse of mortality’. In many respects this was an early form of what we now term medical research; theories about the role of diet and mental health in determining lifespan, as well as conjecture about the curative properties of just about everything. It is the author’s great achievement, however, that throughout this wide-ranging enquiry he is able to preserve the often hazy distinction between simple medical investigation and that undertaken with longevity as its principal aim.