Want to create an interactive transcript for this episode?
Podcast: Trinity Long Room Hub Podcasts
Episode: Life Narratives and the Biological Reality of Ageing
Description: Recorded March 16, 2023.
A lecture by Martina Zimmermann (King's College London) as part of the Medical and Health Humanities Seminar Series.
Cultural pessimism about ageing is grounded in a decline narrative that upholds youth as embodying the independent, vital self. Scientific accounts of senescence, by comparison, describe ageing as a life-time continuum involving ‘growth, development, and maturation … just as much as atrophy and degeneration’ (Shock, 1951, p. 1). This means culture adopts a partial perspective on the biological realities of ageing, taking outcomes of senescence research as merely extending the years fraught with age-related ailments, where dreams of arrested ageing further fuel pessimism, becaus...