Dr Natalie Kaoukji is a historian of early modern science and medicine. Her research interests are broadly in the transformation of natural knowledge in the early modern period, with particular interests in the poetics of early modern technology and the prolongation of life. She studied first English literature and then History of Science at the University of Cambridge where she has since been based in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science. Her research on the prolongation of life has been supported by a fellowship from the Wellcome Trust.
‘Overturning natural limitations: prolonging life in the seventeenth century’, June 2019.
The prolongation of life is one of a number of projects which are taken to be characteristically ‘modern’ about the period around the seventeenth century. Prolonging life had in common with a number of other projects on Boyle’s list the curious combination of being judged only newly conceivable as well as having a very long history. In this talk I’ll look at what prolonging life might have had in common with such schemes as mechanical flight or breathing underwater, and at ways that we might think about locating something peculiarly modern in these projects.