A Genealogy of the Life History Album (1884): Gerontology, Genre, and Health Across the Life Span

Abstract

Abstract This paper demonstrates what emerges when we undertake a literary reading of a medical text, examining its form and structure as a text. The study of what appears to be a singular publication reveals instead an under-examined moment in medical history that anticipates contemporary health investigations in modern medicine, while reflecting the limitations of medical and gerontological knowledge in the 1880s. I demonstrate this argument by conducting a Foucauldian archeology of the text, with attention to authorship and the concept of textual genre. My primary text is the Life History Album (1884), which I link to a related endeavor, G. M. Humphry’s Old Age (1889), a little-known publication that contains medical observations on the resiliency of aging bodies and anticipates ideas associated with early twentieth-century geriatrics. My investigation brings new attention to the work of Dr. Frederick Akbar Mahomed, a pioneer in the study of hypertension, whose story is part of the genealogy of the text. Inviting its creator to keep records of health throughout the life span, the Life History Album anticipates a new kind of modern subject, who participates in co-creating his or her medical and life health history, whereas Humphry’s Old Age, which draws on similar methods, is humanistic, includes literary references, and allows for contentment in older age.