The centuries-old, extremely masculine pursuit of eternal life

Humanity the oldest epic it is a doomed pursuit of immortality: About four thousand years ago, the Sumerians told of a Mesopotamian king named Gilgamesh who set out in search of eternal life and briefly found a youth-restoring plant, only to lose it on his way home. As the story goes, two thousand years later, a Chinese magician named Xu Fu convinced to the emperor that beyond the Yellow Sea there is an elixir that grants eternal life. The emperor provided Xu Fu with ships and 3,000 maidens, which the magician believed were necessary for the expedition. When the emperor learned that he had made little progress, Xu Fu said that he also needed the army that the emperor had provided him. Xu Fu swam out and was never seen again by the emperor.

The desire for eternal life was also animated by the stories of the Macedonian king Alexander the Great and Spanish conquistador Juan Ponce de León. They also ended in failure. This is a lesson that was lost by alchemists who, for centuries, searched for a drink that would grant immortality. Among them was Isaac Newton, who went to his grave in the early 18th century, believing that his alchemical research would one day prove more critical than his laws of motion.

However, even before Newton’s death, Enlightenment thinkers replaced the dream of immortality with the less ambitious goal of living longer. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word “longevity” comes first. emerged in 1500. Just like the first book on the longevity diet, after the Italian nobleman Luigi Cornaro began to suspect that his tendency to drink alcohol, lavish feasts and staying up delayed at night was negatively affecting his health. From then on, he gave in to avarice every day portionsincluding lots of eggs, milk, broth and vegetables, and lived to the age of 80, when he wrote their eating habits in “Conversations about sober living”. Her advice was probably better than that of many of her successors, among them ill-advised American offerings “Meat for Every Occasion” and “Calories Don’t Count”.

Cornaro stumbled upon the newfangled concept of calorie restriction, a practice that researchers have shown to escalate animal lifespan. dogs, mice, monkeysworms and — according to one massive one test — maybe even people. But Cornaro apparently favored others too, less scientific limitations like abstinencewhich he believed would preserve its vitality. He was misled, but he was not alone. This way of thinking remained in vogue for centuries after his death. One urologist started in Chicago exchange testicles of people, including his own, with those of younger men. Nine years later, in 1923 died at 65.

In the same year, Austrian physiologist Eugen Steinach announced a up-to-date genital surgery to treat aging diseases. Among the early ones recipients The operation was carried out by Sigmund Freud, who nevertheless died of cancer at the age of 83. However, surgery called vasectomyit still lives, although for a much different purpose.