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The Old, Old, Old Man

As the story goes, Old Tom Parr was relatively healthy for being 152 until a visit to noxious, polluted London in 1635 cut his long life short. Katherine Harvey investigates the early modern claims surrounding this supercentarian and the fraudulent longevity business that became his namesake in the 19th century.

The answers to these questions reflect the early modern preoccupation with healthy living, and in particular the belief that a set of factors known as “the six non-naturals” (namely air and environment, food and drink, exercise, sleep, excretion, and the emotions) had a significant effect on an individual’s health. Throughout the nineteenth century, magazines such as Household Words ran articles that satirised both the product and its makers; one Punch sketch went so far as to suggest “throwing of 12,000,000 boxes of PARR’S Life Pills into the sea, for the benefit of the fishes and the good of the public who might otherwise get hold of the medicine”. Others printed mock testimonials that contained claims even more exaggerated than those found in the real adverts (which were surely, it was suggested, the work of anonymous scribblers rather than genuine customers): one particularly outrageous example concerned a man who had supposedly survived falling into the crater of Vesuvius and being blown up at Waterloo thanks to these tiny tablets.

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