British Academy: The UK's National Academy for the Humanities and Social Sciences
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Enquiry, Evidence and Facts: An Interdisciplinary Conference
'False Facts' and the Facts of Life (and Death)
Dr David Haycock
National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London SE10 9NF
An abstract presented to the conference
‘Enquiry, Evidence and Facts: An Interdisciplinary conference’
at the British Academy, London, on 13 December 2007
Biography
Dr David Haycock is Curator of Seventeenth-Century Maritime and Imperial History at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich. Between 2003 and 2005 he was a Wellcome Research Fellow in the Department of Economic History at the London School of Economics, working with Dr Patrick Wallis on the history of medicine in seventeenth-century London. During this time he also participated in the Department’s Leverhulme-funded project, ‘The Nature of Evidence: How Well do Facts Travel?’, exploring the history of ageing. His latest book, Mortal Coil: A Short History of Immortality, based on research undertaken at the Clark Library, UCLA, is to be published by Yale University Press in spring 2008.
Abstract
An indisputable fact of human life is death. But what, exactly, is the maximum likely human life span? This remains a not undisputed question in the twenty-first century, and has been a question that has long puzzled and intrigued physicians and philosophers. New research is leading to suggestions that it may soon prove possible to extend life beyond the current acknowledged record of 122½ years (set in 1997 by a French woman, Jean Calment). Certain biogerontologists, in particular the increasingly notorious Dr Aubrey de Grey of Cambridge, England, are suggesting that immortality is plausibly within our grasp. ‘I think I’ll either die of old age between the ages of 90 and 110,’ de Grey told a journalist in 2006, ‘or I’ll die from an accident at an age so great that it cannot be predicted.’
In the seventeenth century, in attempting to establish the fact of maximum human life span, great store was set by the account of Genesis: Adam and Eve, had they not eaten the forbidden fruit, would have been immortal. Methuselah, oldest of all the patriarchs, had died at 969. In 1646, the literary physician Sir Thomas Browne questioned the supposed ages of some Biblical characters, but insisted that ‘of those ten mentioned in Scripture with their severall ages it must be true’. Indeed, he pointed out that other patriarchs, whose life spans were not given in the sacred text, might actually have lived longer than Methuselah. He rejected the suggestion made by some critics that these so-called years had in fact been lunar months – a calculation that would have made Methuselah a more plausible 90-odd when he died. This theory was wrong on a number of accounts, Browne explained, not least because it ran into ‘an absurdity, for they make Enoch to beget children about six years of age; for whereas it is said he begat Methuselah at 65’. The human body had been created for exceptionally long life; this was a fact. The factors that brought our lives so miserably short included a combination of sinfulness, poor diet, laziness, fornication, and the supposed declining fertility of the Earth since the Flood.
Although the Bible acknowledged that the age of man had since fallen to 70 or 80 years at most, in his influential study, The History of Life and Death (1623), Sir Francis Bacon proposed it might be possible to restore our life spans to the great lengths of the patriarchs – even, perhaps, for men to return our knowledge to that once possessed by Adam, and to become immortal.
The records gathered by credible observers supported the belief that there were very old people alive in seventeenth-century England. Bacon’s former secretary, the philosopher Thomas Hobbes, died in 1679, aged 91, whilst the MP John Holland died in 1701, at 97; these ages have been confirmed by modern historians. We might consider these rare (and no doubt they were), but as Dr James Hart of Northampton wrote in 1633, to ‘attaine to 100 is no wonder’: thus in Oxford the antiquary Anthony Wood noted the passing of two local women, both aged 104; in 1681 the physician and philosopher John Locke recorded a conversation with an old woman who told him she was 108; the antiquary Robert Plot remarked in 1686 that James Sands had died in Staffordshire in 1588, aged 140, whilst Sir William Temple – English ambassador to The Hague and a scholarly man – met a beggar who professed to be 124. Accounts from overseas suggested that more primitive peoples lived even longer than urbanised Europeans: Temple observed, for example, that the native Brazilians were said ‘to have lived two hundred, some three hundred Years’.
The most famous domestic example of such unusual longevity was Thomas Parr, who died in London in 1635, supposedly aged 152. His autopsy was conducted by the anatomist Dr William Harvey, famous for his discovery of the circulation of the blood. Harvey actually concluded that Parr had actually died prematurely, due to the rich diet and bad air he experienced on being brought to London to meet the king. Harvey’s autopsy report was published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, and Parr’s great age was soon established as fact. It would be supported by another autopsy of an aged Englishman, a button-maker named John Bayles, who died in Northampton in 1704 — supposedly in his 130th year. Whilst still alive, Bayles had come to the attention of a local doctor, James Keill (1673—1719). Keill was no ordinary country practitioner, however. A graduate of the University of Edinburgh, he had studied medicine at Leiden and had lectured at Oxford and Cambridge Universities before settling in Northampton. Keill’s autopsy of Bayles was also published in the Philosophical Transactions, its author encouraging more autopsies like his and Harvey’s be undertaken.
Harvey’s autopsy report and its apparent verification of Parr’s great age would be used in evidence on numerous occasions over the following 250 years to suggest (or even to confirm) that man’s ‘natural’ life span was upwards of two centuries. Writers citing his example included John Evelyn (1661); William Derham (1713); Dr George Cheyne (1724); Christoph Wilhelm Hufeland (1797); Sir John Sinclair (1816); Pierre Marie Flourens (1854); Sir Henry Holland (1857); Ilya Ilyich Metchnikoff (1910).
Although he did not cite it as an example, Parr’s great age was of the type of information that Dr John Gregory, Professor of the Practice of Physic at Edinburgh University, would in 1770 call a ‘false fact’. As Gregory observed, ‘An easiness of belief, in regard to particular facts, by admitting them upon weak authority, has corrupted every branch of natural knowledge, but none of them so much as medicine.’ In my paper, I explore in detail the intellectual context necessary for a ‘false fact’ to become established, and look how it may travel very successfully within its intellectual milieu down a number of centuries. Taking Thomas Parr as my example, I will then discuss the subsequent circumstances necessary for that ‘fact’ to become discredited and overthrown, and the difficulties that this met with.