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, 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.

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