The Cult of Youth: Anti-Ageing in Modern Britain by James F. Stark (review)

In the twentieth-century British marketplace of rejuvenation, consumers could select amongst a multitude of desirable products and therapies offering the prospect of enhancing youthfulness. From goat gland operations for improving sexual potency, electric shocks for zapping wrinkles, to Elizabeth Arden creams that blurred lines between the endocrine and aesthetic, Bioserm advertised as "biology's gift to women," along with The iron's vegetarian method, the Zander Electropathic Institute, the Overbeck Rejuvenator, Readson's Duo-Ray Apparatus, the Vienna Youth Mask, and Aspinall's "Neigeline," these commodities encapsulate how the quest for youth transformed against the backdrop of Britain's turbulent interwar years. Indeed, as James Stark argues, "our modern understanding of ageing was, at least in part, shaped by our anxieties about and hopes for both individual and social rejuvenation" (p. 13).

The Cult of Youth provides a historical account of the visibility of rejuvenation beyond conventional narratives of its framework as a pseudoscience movement. Within commercial spaces where "science was used as a tool to establish credibility" (p. 16), physicians and entrepreneurs alike appealed to consumers' desire for beauty and bodily vitality by tying their products to broader socio-economic concerns. Optimistic biomedical developments in endocrinology and vitamin science intersected with cultural debates about national degradation and eugenic fitness, shaping how and why different rejuvenation strategies came to prominence in interwar Britain. Across five chapters, Stark convincingly demonstrates how transforming scientific ideas inspired the development of a range of commercial rejuvenation methods as enablers of vitality—hormone treatments, electrotherapy, skin care, dietary regimes, and exercise plans. Each method embodied its own hopes for individual and social rejuvenation, as well as changing expectations for gender and class expectations in youth and aging. Far from being a short-lived fad that declined by the 1930s, Stark argues that particular kinds of rejuvenation were developed and marketed throughout the twentieth century, retaining a lasting legacy beyond the Second World War in the forms of bariatric surgery, retinol creams and serums, and transcutaneous electric nerve stimulation (TENS) units.

Stark effectively makes use of a wide array of sources—medical textbooks, popular scientific tracts, advertising, magazines, and commercial literature—to show just how deeply embedded rejuvenation was (and is) in British culture. The work of surgical rejuvenators, especially Eugen Steinach and Serge Voronoff, created widespread attention to the commercial possibilities of hormone rejuvenation. Rather than viewing these developments as mere fads spurred by charlatans with fabricated medical credentials, Stark argues that hormone products were an aspect of interwar emphasis in direct-to-consumer marketing. Advertisements used the language of rejuvenation to promote their products, such that by the 1930s, public and professional attitudes toward vitality and virility emphasized a growing need for hormone preparations—including skin serums and sexual potency tablets—for private use in domestic settings.

While promises of rejuvenation through hormone surgery and high-end creams were arguably mainly available to affluent classes, advocates of dietary modification such as vegetarianism and naturopathy mobilized more "natural systems" for achieving rejuvenation. Examining the rise of dietary trends within the backdrop of social actors such as food insecurity during World War I, Stark argues that nutritional science radically reconfigured the relationship between food and ageing (p. 69). Medical texts may have debated the merits of food faddism, but dietary restriction was adopted by lay advocates, and even formed as an "advertiser's dream" for appealing across target audiences (p. 88). Stark studiously connects statistical studies on health and body weight to aspects of anxieties about national fitness, including how deficiency diseases (e.g., pellagra and rickets) were tied to certain demographics, but the discussion deserves further analysis with regards to how different racial groups responded to, or were affected by, food scarcity. Given that the interwar years produced increasing stock on measurement and standardization, it would have been interesting to note how these cultural shifts laid the foundation for mathematizing bodily standards, including the BMI.

The chapters...