Life Narratives and the Biological Reality of Ageing

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, because they hold the status of curative solutions. Culturally prescribed ageing is successful ageing, and any deviation from this narrative script, real or imagined, furthers negativity about progression on the temporal trajectory towards old age. This paper situates the older person and their care at the biology/culture interface. It specifically focuses on life narratives and the concept of successful ageing driving such narratives. In particular, it explores the connection between ageing and illness to interrogate how life narratives confront biological realities of ageing. In doing so it pursues two aims: (1) it looks at the role of illness in older age in directing self-perceptions and self-representations of ageing as failure, and (2) it considers different forms of life narratives and their possibilities and limitations in articulating ageing as a biological reality

Martina Zimmermann is a Lecturer in Health Humanities and Health Sciences in the Department of English at King’s College London. She trained in pharmaceutical sciences, specialised in neuropharmacology and obtained her Habilitation in Pharmacology. She holds a second PhD in the Health Humanities and has written two books about cultural and scientific narratives of dementia, The Poetics and Politics of Alzheimer’s Disease Life-Writing (2017) and The Diseased Brain and the Failing Mind: Dementia in Science, Medicine and Literature of the Long Twentieth Century (2020), both open access thanks to Wellcome Trust funding. She currently runs a research programme on ageing, The Sciences of Ageing and the Culture of Youth (SAACY), funded by a UK Research and Innovation Future Leaders Fellowship. Please register here. This is a hybrid event; in-person attendance is limited. Please indicate if you have any access requirements, such as ISL/English interpreting, so that we can facilitate you in attending this event. Contact: Des.ONeill@tcd.ie