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.