Introduction

Thanks to a unique combination of enabling factors, eighteenth-century English medical writers could champion agency over aging bodies in new and exciting proportions. Managing and controlling the aging body seemed more possible and more tangible than it had ever before, and perhaps more so than it has seemed since. At base, much of this can be explained by the factors considered in previous chapters: the aging of the body was still conceived to have its loci in the outside world, and human lifespan was not yet considered universal or fixed. With such an epistemological framework in place it seems inevitable that aging might be considered an inherently manageable phenomenon. Yet as well as playing host to these already flexible epistemological underpinnings, the eighteenth century also saw the advent of some new ideas that made management of the aging body all the more feasible. New physiological paradigms and psychoperceptual schemes could be called upon to explain and endorse agency over the aging body in more stimulating and ‘scientific’ ways. Thanks furthermore to a burgeoning print culture in which medical texts could thrive and a cultural moment attuned to celebrating the performative aspects of bodiliness, agency over the aging body became a distinctive aspect of discourse. This was a historical moment at which agency over aging was fundamentally unproblematic, practically explicable and culturally apt.

Having taken a broad and multi-faceted approach in the previous chapter, this chapter focuses on practical, physiological interpretations of the aging body provided by the medical establishment. In addition to the established humoral scheme, there was a new and distinctly more ‘scientific’ vision that was breaking onto the scene at the dawn of the period under discussion here. In Western Europe, in the first half of the eighteenth century, two important medical men and latter-day physiologists were to provide new models of bodily function that reconfigured the whole notion of life and its operations between cradle and grave.