Aging is a fundamental aspect of the human condition, yet different eras have understood it in very different ways and suggested very different means of defining, measuring and improving it. Yallop looks at how people in eighteenth-century England understood the lifelong process of growing older, in order to reconstruct a set of ideas about age, bodies, identity and change. Advances in science and medicine at this time meant that scholars and doctors could investigate why the body got older, how aging was experienced and what the aging body signified in society.