Life Narratives and the Biological Reality of Ageing

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. Learn more at:
https://www.tcd.ie/trinitylongroomhub/