{"id":60438,"date":"2013-09-23T15:58:23","date_gmt":"2013-09-23T19:58:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=60438"},"modified":"2013-09-23T16:00:18","modified_gmt":"2013-09-23T20:00:18","slug":"the-immortality-chronicles-part-6","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2013\/09\/23\/the-immortality-chronicles-part-6\/","title":{"rendered":"The Immortality Chronicles, Part 6"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"walt-whitmanlarge\"<\/a><\/p>\n

What have we not done to live forever? Adam Leith Gollner\u2019s research into the endless ways we\u2019ve tried to avoid the unavoidable is out now<\/i>\u00a0<\/i>as\u00a0<\/i>The Book of Immortality: The Science, Belief, and Magic Behind Living Forever. Over the past six weeks, this chronological crash course has examined the ways humankind has striven for, grappled with, and dreamed about immortality in different eras throughout history. This week explores the nineteenth century. The final installment will run next Monday. <\/i><\/p>\n

\n

The only secret people keep
Is Immortality.<\/p>\n

\u2014Emily Dickinson, poem number 1748<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Last week, Google launched Calico, a new company dedicated to fighting \u201caging and associated diseases.\u201d The idea of aging as a curable disease (rather than a fact of life) can be traced back to the work of Charles \u00c9douard Brown-S\u00e9quard (1817\u201394), the first medical scientist to make the idea of comprehending\u2014if not controlling\u2014<\/strong>aging a respectable aim.<\/p>\n

Not much remembered today, Brown-S\u00e9quard was the chair of physiology at the Coll\u00e9ge de France, one of the most prestigious appointments in nineteenth-century medicine. He is still known for successfully describing Brown-S\u00e9quard syndrome, a paralysis caused by severed spinal cords. His late-period research, however, occupies one of the more bizarre footnotes in medical history: toward the end of a distinguished career, he stunned the scientific community by announcing that he\u2019d found a glandular elixir of eternal youth.<\/p>\n

His speech on June 1, 1889, at the assembly of Paris\u2019s Soci\u00e9t\u00e9 de Biologie, is widely considered to mark the commencement of gerontology. (Gerontology, from geron<\/em>, meaning \u201cold man\u201d in Greek, is the systematic study of aging.) Most members of the society were in their seventies, as was the swarthy, six-foot-four, bushy-bearded gentleman onstage. In unscheduled introductory remarks, Brown-S\u00e9quard confessed that his natural vigor had declined considerably over the last decade.<\/p>\n

At that time, many scientists felt that old age was not a natural phenomenon, so a murmur of commiseration rippled through the room. Those graying authorities knew full well what it meant to grow elderly and infirm, nodding as Brown-S\u00e9quard lamented his own chronic pain\u2014the lassitude, the insomnia, and, most delicate of all, the decline of his manliness. He had a pretty young wife, he was rich, successful, accomplished\u2014et<\/i> quand m\u00eame<\/i>. <\/p>\n

\u201cI have always thought that the weakness of old men was partly due to the diminution of the function of their sexual glands,\u201d Brown-S\u00e9quard told the crowd. Shouldn\u2019t there be a means of stimulating those tired old glands? To shock them back into action, he posited, would jump-start the entire system.<\/p>\n

In Brown-S\u00e9quard\u2019s time, the functioning of internal secretions, hormones, and our glandular organs was even less understood than it is today. The endocrine system remained an undiscovered enigma. Testicles were thought to produce a sort of vitalizing substance that dissipated with age. Contemporary science recognizes testosterone as an essential component of bodily function. Brown-S\u00e9quard believed it to be the fountain of youth.<\/p>\n

For the past few months, he told the assembly, he had been performing auto-experimentation with liquefied extracts from various glands. Several weeks earlier, he\u2019d opened up the scrotum of a puppy and removed the testicles. Cutting them up, he blended them with an aqueous solution, ran the liquid through a filtration device, and filled a syringe. He then administered injections of the extract into his own thigh. Guinea-pig testes worked just as well, he declared, having inoculated himself with them as well. The physiological effects were, he testified, most satisfying. He\u2019d regained his youthful vitality\u2014in every<\/i> way. Just before the lecture, in fact, he\u2019d managed an elusive feat offering empirical proof: he\u2019d been able to \u201cpay a visit\u201d to his young wife.<\/p>\n

Brown-S\u00e9quard boasted in peer-reviewed publications of having cured impotence. His brand of organotherapy\u2014la m\u00e9thode S\u00e9quardienne<\/i>\u2014became a hit with consumers. He constructed a fantastic machine \u201cwith a belt pulley, tubes, alembic, aeration bladders, instrument dials: into it he fed bull testes pulped, filtered through sand, ascepticized with boric acid, drawn off as a liquor.\u201d Hundreds of elderly men started shooting up pur\u00e9ed testicles. Their deafness diminished, they claimed, hair thickened and darkened, energy levels rose. Penises hardened. Unfortunately, as we now know, they were only getting hits of the placebo effect.<\/p>\n

In no time, critics started railing against Brown-S\u00e9quard\u2019s \u201csenile aberrations.\u201d His contemporaries repeated the experiments, checking them against controls of plain-water injections. The results were conclusive: testicle-pulp inoculation had no noticeable effects. In fact, the saline serum Brown-S\u00e9quard had patented contained barely any hormones. It was just a turbid m\u00e9lange of mashed bollocks in salt water. He was widely denounced. The pretty bride abandoned him. Prestigious journals no longer accepted his papers for publication. He fled to the seaside and died soon after.<\/p>\n

* * *<\/center><\/p>\n

Even as Brown-Sequard went about his experiments, that epoch\u2019s finest literary minds were also contemplating eternal life. Emily Dickinson composed couplets about riding in carriages with immortality. Charles Baudelaire\u2019s suicide note (from a failed 1845 attempt) explained, \u201cI\u2019m killing myself because I believe I am immortal.\u201d Ralph Waldo Emerson described the way \u201cwe become immortal\u201d though contemplating nature.<\/p>\n

The transcendentalist philosophers\u2019 theoretical musings were given flesh wings by Walt Whitman. In \u201cSong of Myself,\u201d he reclines on a hill, meditating upon a leaf of grass, and finds an unshakable conviction in never-ending life. Grass, he realizes, is the uncut hair of graves, life emerging from decay. \u201cThe smallest sprout shows there is really no death.\u201d He is deathless, and the reader is deathless too. Everything is deathless: \u201cI swear I think there is nothing but immortality!\u201d<\/p>\n

Whitman, singing of himself, is also singing of ourselves, \u201cof people, all just as immortal and fathomless as myself. (They do not know how immortal but I know.)\u201d Any insignificant object is connection to this truth. He finds God in the tiniest, most ordinary places. Some barns, any old gnat, the breeze; all revelations. Whitman wasn\u2019t religious in the sense of belonging to an institutional organization, but nor could he accept the limitations of atheism or agnosticism. A little mouse \u201cis miracle enough to stagger sextillions of infidels.\u201d Unbelievers merely have to look around to be convinced, he wrote. Trees, seaweed, squirrels\u2014everything is immortal: \u201cI swear I see now that every thing has an eternal soul!\u201d<\/p>\n

This truth is omnigenous, Whitman felt, meaning it is in all things. We can find it anywhere, in the hollows at the bottom of the sea, in rocky riverbeds, in dust. If we ever lose sight of it, we can find it simply by looking under our boots, Whitman assured us. The message is all around us. \u201cFailing to fetch me at first keep encouraged, missing me one place search another, I stop somewhere waiting for you.\u201d So even if we can\u2019t see it right away, we have the ability to see it. Finding it doesn\u2019t mean understanding it. \u201cI hear and behold God in every object,\u201d Whitman admits, \u201cyet understand God not in the least.\u201d<\/p>\n

Still, such realizations strip him of the fear of dying. \u201cAs to you Death, and you bitter hug of mortality, it is idle to try to alarm me \u2026 and as to you Life I reckon you are the leaving of many deaths, (no doubt I have died myself ten thousand times before).\u201d<\/p>\n

Whether describing rebirth, reincarnation, or resurrection, Whitman (like Emily Dickinson) was more than open to life after death. He also believed that all religions had something to teach us: \u201cI adopt each theory, myth, god, and demi-god, \/ I see that the old accounts, bibles, genealogies, are true, without exception.\u201d What all those eschatologies teach is akin to Whitman\u2019s preaching: death is both an end and a beginning. He never aligned himself with a single faith, but consider these lines:<\/p>\n

\n

All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses,
And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Adam Leith Gollner\u2019s <\/em>The Book of Immortality: The Science, Belief, and Magic Behind Living Forever<\/a> (Scribner) is out now.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

What have we not done to live forever? Adam Leith Gollner\u2019s research into the endless ways we\u2019ve tried to avoid the unavoidable is out now\u00a0as\u00a0The Book of Immortality: The Science, Belief, and Magic Behind Living Forever. Over the past six weeks, this chronological crash course has examined the ways humankind has striven for, grappled with, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":581,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7554],"tags":[11899,2186,2056,11901,11898,11652,11900,11902,264],"class_list":["post-60438","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history-2","tag-charles-edouard-brown-sequard","tag-death","tag-emily-dickinson","tag-gerontology","tag-google-calico","tag-immortality","tag-societe-de-biologie","tag-transcendentalism","tag-walt-whitman"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nThe Immortality Chronicles, Part 6 by Adam Leith Gollner<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"September 23, 2013 \u2013 What have we not done to live forever? 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