A grave matter of life and death

LONGEVITY:IN 1623, Francis Bacon, aged 63, published The History Naturall and Experimentall, of Life and Death, in which he expressed his conviction that human life could be vastly prolonged beyond its present span.

It was a matter, he wrote, of effecting repairs to the "dry" parts of the body: the veins, cartilage, sinews, bones and bowels. This was assuredly "a work of labour; and consisteth of many remedies", among which nostrums Bacon counted opium, nightshade, hemlock, nutmeg and a certain "Methuselan Water" made from crayfish boiled in claret. He also recommended bathing in human blood, but acknowledged that this might seem "sluttish and odious".

It's unclear whether Bacon followed his own regimen, but it seems the quest for longer life did for him in the end. Three years later, while stuffing a chicken with snow as part of an experiment in the preservation of flesh, he caught a chill and quickly died.

Bacon's specifics against the onset of old age were by no means eccentric. As David Boyd Haycock's fascinating book makes clear, the quest for longevity has inspired all manner of strange prescriptions. In the 17th century, the antiquarian Elias Ashmole posited an "Angellical Stone" that would stave off dilapidation; Sir Walter Raleigh was reputed to have devised a precious and life-giving cordial containing gold and powdered hart's horn. Sir William Temple counselled the use of garlic, tobacco and crushed millipedes in butter, while the Flemish physician Jean Baptiste von Helmont conjectured that a cure for senescence "was to be fetched out of a most wholesome, odoriferous, balsamical and almost immortal Shrub".

Von Helmont's fanciful bush was as much metaphorical as medicinal: an offshoot alike of the Edenic tree of life and the cedar from which Noah had built the ark. As Boyd Haycock points out, the early-modern desire for longevity (or even immortality) was spurred by the idea that life-spans had drastically shrunk since biblical times.

Were it not for the Fall, Adam and Eve would have lived forever; had it not been for the Flood, we might all still live for centuries like our antediluvian ancestors. This notion seems to have survived the advent of modern science: well into the 18th century, many believed that the extension of life, if it could be achieved, would amount to a return to prelapsarian days. Not everybody was convinced, however: in 1668, Robert Hooke averred that friction had slowed the rotation of the earth over centuries, so that the 17th-century year was simply much longer than the ancient.

What made the prospect of prodigious longevity more believable was the picturesque supply of super-aged individuals in the pages of scientific papers, in the press and in the popular imagination.

The most celebrated was one Thomas Parr - known uninventively as "Old" Parr - who was widely accepted to have been aged 152 at his death in 1635. William Harvey (discoverer of the circulation of the blood) carried out an autopsy, and concluded from the state of the "organs of generation" that the old man had had sex as recently as 1600. He had died, claimed Harvey, only because he had left his rural home for the smoke and filth of London.

Parr's case was still being regularly aired in the 19th century, by which time the notion of a decline in longevity had itself declined. Rather, for the Victorians, longer life was part of the promise of a scientifically and medically advanced future: in the wake of the Enlightenment, humanity seemed potentially perfectible. But as Boyd Haycock skilfully demonstrates, this optimism was shadowed throughout the century by the spectre of physical and moral degeneration. In Frankenstein, Jekyll and Hydeand Dracula, the horror consists in the fact that scientific modernity might lead to monstrous decrepitude: we might live on forever, but in a state of physical and moral decay.

At the height of this Victorian unease, the decadence is projected outwards: writing in 1872, William Rathbone Greg fears that the "careless, squalid, unaspiring Irishman" is in danger of flourishing at the expense of the frugal Scot.

It is in the 20th century, however, that the narrative of Mortal Coilis most intimately ravelled up with what we might call modern biopolitics. Thousands submitted hopefully, in the early years of the century, to "monkey gland" transplants and the celebrated Steinach procedure (essentially a vasectomy) which WB Yeats imagined had given him a new puberty in 1934. Such operations were precursors both of the medical terrors unleashed by the Nazis in the name of advancing the race, and of our contemporary obsession with eking out a few more years via pharmaceuticals, surgery and media-sponsored "lifestyle changes".

Hitherto unthinkable longevity - and perhaps even more pressingly, what to do with those who attain it - is today as much a matter of public policy as of ingenious (or deluded) scientific research. David Boyd Haycock tells the story of the urge towards immortality with eloquence and impressive attention to detail. As a specialist in the 17th century, he is perhaps more engaging in the early chapters: there, incident and anecdote seem more vigorous than in the 19th century, where he tends towards conventional précis of the ideas of Nietzsche, Darwin and Freud.

Things liven up again with the appearance of the gland-handlers and early-20th-century quackery in general, but the suspicion is that Boyd Haycock is more at home with strict medical history than with philosophical or psychological motives. The latter are surely extremely ambiguous: longevity promises wisdom and tedium in equal measure, and it is perhaps no bad thing that, as the physician Thomas Browne wrote in 1669, "in vain do Individuals hope for Immortality, or any patent from Oblivion".

• Brian Dillon is UK editor of Cabinet, a quarterly of art and culture based in New York. He is the author of a memoir, In the Dark Room (Penguin, 2005) and is working on Tormented Hope: Nine Hypochondriac Lives, to be published in 2009

Mortal Coil: A Short History of Living Longer By David Boyd Haycock Yale University Press 308pp. £18.99