Books interview: Mark Jackson

What sorts of books inspired you when you were young?
In retrospect, my favourite books in my teenage years were fairly bleak. After a rich diet of Agatha Christie, I slipped easily into the underworld of the American science fiction writer Ursula Le Guin, particularly her Earthsea trilogy. From there, it was a short descent into existentialism and the angst-ridden novels of Jean-Paul Sartre (The Roads to Freedom and Nausea) and Albert Camus’ The Plague, which drew me towards medical history.

What other books led you to focus your research career on medical history?
I became interested in the history of medicine while I was a medical student, but the most significant influence on my early career was the late great historian Roy Porter. From his magisterial overview The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity to his focused studies of the history of madness, Porter offered passionate analyses of medicine in the past.

What books then spurred you to look at specific syndromes such as stress and now the midlife crisis?
My interest in the history of stress was triggered by reading books by the scientist Hans Selye: Stress without Distress and The Stress of Life. By contrast, my study of the midlife crisis emerged from reading post-war literature: John Updike’s Rabbit series of novels; David Ely’s Seconds; Joseph Heller’s Something Happened; Sloan Wilson’s The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit; and Doris Lessing’s The Summer before the Dark.

Can you recommend a few classic first-hand accounts of midlife crises?
In Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Carl Jung clearly sets out the midlife crisis that he experienced in his late thirties – triggered in part by his split from Sigmund Freud. In The Crack-Up, F. Scott Fitzgerald similarly reveals the characteristic doubts and despair that can accompany middle age. Gail Sheehy’s Passages: Predictable Crises of Adult Life offers an alternative perspective. She not only recounts a critical transition of her own, but also traces the contours of personal crises in both women and men. She also published Lovesounds, a novel that follows the struggles of a middle-aged woman to recover from her husband’s infidelity.

What books proved useful models in analysing the history of the complex (and somewhat nebulous) topic of midlife crisis?
There are two particular books that helped me understand how to write about midlife. Margaret Morganroth Gullette’s Aged by Culture is an astute analysis of the ways in which our experiences of ageing are shaped by the values and norms of the societies in which we live. Even more directly, I learned much from Steven Mintz’s erudite American study The Prime of Life: A History of Modern Adulthood.

What is the last book you gave as a gift, and to whom?
Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet, to my wife – a beautifully told fictional account of the life and death of Shakespeare’s son.

What books do you have on your desk waiting to be read?
I am currently working on a book about two women accused of murder in the mid-19th century. Top of my pile is Judith Knelman’s Twisting in the Wind: The Murderess and the English Press.

Mark Jackson is director, and professor of the history of medicine, at the University of Exeter’s Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health. His latest book is Broken Dreams: An Intimate History of the Midlife Crisis (Reaktion).