In Jonathan Swift's 1726 satirical novel Gulliver's Travels, the name struldbrugg (sometimes spelled struldbrug)[1][2][3][4] is given to those humans in the nation of Luggnagg who are born seemingly normal, but are in fact immortal.

They have no remembrance of anything but what they learned and observed in their youth and middle age, and even that is very imperfect; and for the truth or particulars of any fact it is safer to depend on common tradition, than upon their best recollections.

After that period, they are held incapable of any employment of trust or profit; they cannot purchase lands, or take leases; neither are they allowed to be witnesses in any cause, either civil or criminal or economic, not even for the decision of meers (metes) and bounds.

Because: Otherwise, as avarice is the necessary consequence of old age, those immortals would in time become proprietors of the whole nation, and engross the civil power, which, for want of abilities to manage, must end in the ruin of the public.

The term struldbrug (with one "g") has been used in science fiction, most prolifically by Larry Niven,[5] Robert Silverberg, and Pohl & Kornbluth to describe supercentenarians.