Darwin was born into the wealthy and inbred Darwin-Wedgwood family. He turned out to have too nervous a temperament to be a doctor, being unable to stand the sight of blood or surgery. So in time his father agreed to finance a trip as a gentleman companion of a well-born naval officer, Sir Robert Fitzroy. The previous Captain of the Beagle and Fitzroy's uncle were both suicides. Fitzroy felt he needed a traveling and dining companion of his own social class to keep his sanity during a long voyage. The voyage's purpose was to conduct geographical and hydrographic surveys. Darwin collected numerous samples of plant and animal life along the way, as gentleman scholars of the day did, and wrote an extensive journal of his travels after returning to England. After the Beagle voyage, he enjoyed celebrity as a geologist. But he soon retreated to a life of seclusion on a country estate, being given to psychomatic ailments and frequent nervous breakdowns his entire life:
... As a medical student at Edinburgh University, Darwin found that he was too sensitive to the sight of blood and the brutality of surgery at the time, so he turned his attention to natural history, an extramural interest he developed further when studying at the University of Cambridge to qualify as a clergyman.
On 10 December 1831, as he waited in Plymouth for the voyage on HMS Beagle to begin, he suffered from chest pain and heart palpitations, but told no one at the time in case it stopped him from going on the survey expedition. [2] ......
After the voyage ended on 2 October 1836, he quickly established himself as an eminent geologist, at the same time secretly beginning speculations on transmutation as he conceived of his theory. On 20 September 1837, he suffered "an uncomfortable palpitation of the heart" and as "strongly" advised by his doctors, left for a month of recuperation in the countryside. That October he wrote, "Of late anything which flurries me completely knocks me up afterwards, and brings on a violent palpitation of the heart." [3] In the spring of 1838 he was overworked, worried and suffering stomach upsets and headaches which caused him to be unable to work for days on end. These intensified and heart troubles returned, so in June he went "geologising" in Scotland and felt fully recuperated. Later that year however, bouts of illness returned — a pattern which would continue. He married Emma Wedgwood on 29 January 1839, and in December of that year as Emma's first pregnancy progressed, he fell ill and accomplished little during the following year.
For over forty years Darwin suffered intermittently from various combinations of symptoms such as: malaise, vertigo, dizziness, muscle spasms and tremors, vomiting, cramps and colics, bloating and nocturnal intestinal gas, headaches, alterations of vision, severe tiredness, nervous exhaustion, dyspnea, skin problems such as blistersall over the scalp and eczema, crying, anxiety, sensation of impending death and loss of consciousness, fainting, tachycardia, insomnia, tinnitus, and depression.
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Darwin desperately tried many different therapies, within the limitations of medical science of his time. He took all kinds of medicines, including bismuth compounds and laudanum, and even tried quack therapies, such as electrical stimulation of the abdomen with a shocking belt. On 16 May 1865, he wrote to John Chapman, who was now a qualified specialist in dyspepsia, sickness and psychological medicine. [28] Chapman had sent Darwin a book about a therapy for seasickness of applying ice bags to the small of the back, and Darwin invited him to Down House to try out this therapy. In a manuscript dated 20 May 1865, thought to have been for Chapman, Darwin described his symptoms: [29]
Age 56-57. - For 25 years extreme spasmodic daily & nightly flatulence: occasional vomiting, on two occasions prolonged during months. Vomiting preceded by shivering, hysterical crying, dying sensations or half-faint. & copious very palid urine. Now vomiting & every paroxys[m] of flatulence preceded by singing of ears, rocking, treading on air & vision. focus & black dots – All fatigues, specially reading, brings on these Head symptoms ?? nervousness when E[mma] leaves me..." [the list continues] [30]
In his autobiography of 1876, Darwin wrote of his illness, emphasising that it was brought on by "excitement":
Few persons can have lived a more retired life than we have done. Besides short visits to the houses of relations, and occasionally to the seaside or elsewhere, we have gone nowhere. During the first part of our residence we went a little into society, and received a few friends here; but my health almost always suffered from the excitement, violent shivering and vomiting attacks being thus brought on. I have therefore been compelled for many years to give up all dinner-parties; and this has been somewhat of a deprivation to me, as such parties always put me into high spirits. From the same cause I have been able to invite here very few scientific acquaintances.
My chief enjoyment and sole employment throughout life has been scientific work; and the excitement from such work makes me for the time forget, or drives quite away, my daily discomfort. I have therefore nothing to record during the rest of my life, except the publication of my several books. ... [31]
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Alfred Russell Wallace was a more experienced and well-traveled naturalist but didn't enjoy Darwin's resources or social standing. He is the one who came up, independently with the concept of natural selection, though he didn't use that term himself, and sent a manuscript on his theory to Darwin. He hoped Darwin would credit the theory lest it be ignored due to its origin from a common man. Darwin didn't let him down. He promptly stole the idea, with the aid of prominent friends, and it was presented as a "joint" effort with Wallace being ignored and forgotten:
..... On 18 June 1858, Darwin received the manuscript from Wallace. While Wallace's essay obviously did not employ Darwin's term "natural selection", it did outline the mechanics of an evolutionary divergence of species from similar ones due to environmental pressures. In this sense, it was very similar to the theory that Darwin had worked on for twenty years, but had yet to publish. Darwin sent the manuscript to Charles Lyell with a letter saying "he could not have made a better short abstract! Even his terms now stand as heads of my chapters ... he does not say he wishes me to publish, but I shall, of course, at once write and offer to send to any journal." [74] Distraught about the illness of his baby son, Darwin put the problem to Charles Lyell and Joseph Hooker, who decided to publish the essay in a joint presentation together with unpublished writings which highlighted Darwin's priority. Wallace had not asked for publication of his essay, and indeed, doing so probably contravened the copyright law of the time. Wallace's essay was presented to the Linnean Society of London on 1 July 1858, along with excerpts from an essay which Darwin had disclosed privately to Hooker in 1847 and a letter Darwin had written to Asa Gray in 1857. [75]
Communication with Wallace in far-off Malay was impossible without months of delay, so he was not part of this rapid publication. Fortunately, Wallace accepted the arrangement after the fact, happy that he had been included at all, and never expressed public or private bitterness. Darwin's social and scientific status was far greater than Wallace's, and it was unlikely that, without Darwin, Wallace's views on evolution would have been taken seriously. Lyell and Hooker's arrangement relegated Wallace to the position of co-discoverer, and he was not the social equal of Darwin or the other prominent British natural scientists. ....
Darwin was thus essentially a pamphleteer and thief. Certain social elements needed such a theory and Darwin filled the bill as a socially respectable originator. |
