August 2002, Vol 92, No. 8 | American Journal of Public Health 1222
© 2002 American Public Health Association
Young Men of 50 and 60 Years Behave Like Kids After Having Read the New Work by M. Flourens
Elizabeth Fee,
Theodore M. Brown,
Jan Lazarus and
Paul Theerman
Elizabeth Fee, Jan Lazarus, and Paul Theerman are with the History of Medicine Division, National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Md. Theodore M. Brown is with the Departments of History and of Community and Preventive Medicine at the University of Rochester, Rochester, NY.
Correspondence: Requests for reprints should be sent to Elizabeth Fee, PhD, Building 38, Room 1E21, 8600 Rockville Pike, Bethesda, MD 20894 (e-mail: elizabeth_fee{at}nlm.nih.gov).
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INTRODUCTION
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IN THIS LITHOGRAPH BY 19TH-century French artist and caricaturist Honoré Daumier, we see 2 elderly gentlemen kicking up their heels and dancing. They have just read a new book by the distinguished physiologist Jean Pierre Marie Flourens (1794– 1867), De la longévité humaine et de la quantité de vie sur la globe (On human longevity and the quantity of life upon the globe), first published in 1854.1 In this work, Flourens argued that, as a general rule, mammals live 5 times the length of their growing period. Since he put the human growth period at 30 years, he concluded that the natural span of human life should be 150 years. No wonder these gentlemen are kicking up their heels upon discovering that they are, in reality, youngsters! Absent from Flourens’s argument was any sensitivity to the social context of aging as discussed by Isaac Max Rubinow and excerpted in this issue of the Journal.2
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Source. Prints and Photographs Collection, History of Medicine Division, National Library of Medicine.
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Flourens was a professor at the Collège de France and permanent secretary of the Académie de sciences de France, and he had published important experimental work on the functions of different parts of the central nervous system. An authoritarian guardian of scientific orthodoxy, he had also poured scorn on the evolutionary ideas of Charles Darwin.3 The more radical Daumier made fun of many such established authorities. His clever and irreverent caricatures of professors, lawyers, politicians, and the middle class in general would earn him considerable notoriety, an enthusiastic following, and a 6-month jail term.
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Footnotes
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Note. Most of the Prints and Photographs Collection of the History of Medicine Division of the National Library of Medicine may be viewed through the on-line database "Images From the History of Medicine" at http://wwwihm.nlm.nih.gov/. The Web site also provides information on ordering reproductions of images. If you have a print, photograph, or other visual item that might be appropriate for this collection, please contact the History of Medicine Division.
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References
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1. Flourens P. De la longévité humaine et de la quantité de vie sur la globe. Paris, France: Garnier Frères; 1854.
2. Rubinow IM. The old man’s problem in modern industry. Am J Public Health.2002;92:1223–1226.[Free Full Text]
3. Appel TA. The Cuvier-Geoffroy Debate: French Biology in the Decades Before Darwin. New York, NY: Oxford University Press; 1987.
Copyright © 2002 by the American Public Health Association
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INTRODUCTION
References
