Young men of 50 and 60 years behave like kids after having read the new work by M. Flourens.

Abstract

IN THIS LITHOGRAPH BY 19TH-century French artist and caricaturist Honore 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 longevite humaine et de la quantite 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 Figure Source. Prints and Photographs Collection, History of Medicine Division, National Library of Medicine. Flourens was a professor at the College de France and permanent secretary of the Academie 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.