6. Luigi Cornaro's Discorsi della vita sobria (1558)
represents a Renaissance combination of Cicero's ide-
alization of senescence and a simplified Galenic
regimen. Anyone can expect a span of 100 to 120 years
of healthy, happy life. The Discorsi are suffused with
a joie de vivre unknown in comparable Greco-Roman
writings.
Cornaro's Discorsi serve as the prototype of “pro-
longevity hygiene”: the belief that longevity can be
extended significantly by simple reforms in the indi-
vidual's habits of life. The primitivist assumption that
man is long-lived “by nature” was reinforced by
credulity about supercentenarians; e.g., Harvey's au-
topsy report on Thomas Parr (d. 1635), who, according
to the physiologist, had attained nearly 153 years. The
romantic physician Christoph Wilhelm Hufeland (Art
of Prolonging Life, 1796) aims at 200 years via preser-
vation of a “vital power” (analogous to electromagnet-
ism); also he cites the “law” of comparative biology
of Albrecht von Haller that an animal lives eight times
as long as its period of growth.
The individualism and simplistic pathology underly-
ing prolongevity hygiene were eroded by the rise of
social hygiene and the development of sophisticated
etiological concepts and powerful therapeutic methods
(Shryock, 1936). And William J. Thomas (Human
Longevity, 1873) established criteria which effectively
challenged the validity of traditional cases of super-
centenarianism.
