Charles Darwin

by Janet Browne

  To these should be added other idiosyncrasies that appear only transiently in the written record but affected his daily routine. Darwin’s friends saw how his mind churned and boiled for hours on end underneath the placid and affable outer surface, ceaselessly picking over the threads of his research, pursuing natural history problems in obsessive detail, seemingly trapped in an everlasting game of chess in which he felt he needed to hold all past and future moves in his head before deciding which way to step. Francis Darwin noted his father’s intense mental activity, his inability to sleep once he was fired up, his fatigue the following day, and suggested that this teeming intellectual energy was extremely difficult to quench. Darwin’s mind evidently raced with ideas in the small hours of the night, dwelling on problems large and small. On one occasion he woke up his son William in order to apologise for a remark that he had magnified out of all proportion with the passing minutes—he could not settle down to sleep until he made amends. Another time, he dressed by moonlight, slipped out of the back door, and visited John Innes in the dark to clarify a troubling point. In the daylight hours, he would dispatch lengthy, almost amusingly convoluted explanatory letters to colleagues to make sure that they did not misunderstand him. Not unexpectedly, he experienced headaches, had difficulties with sleeping, woke early, and occasionally thought he detected slight palpitations of the heart.

  Often he felt cold. Cold fingers and toes were apparently a family trait, and Darwin may have suffered from poor circulation and low blood pressure. For years, he was accustomed to take his own pulse on a regular basis, and that of the children, saying with concern that the rate was “feeble,” “irregular,” and “hesitant.” A sluggish circulation could have contributed to the numbness that he sometimes noted in his hands and feet, and giddiness when he stood up. Emma called these fits of “dazzling.” His precautionary measures against the cold were simple. He wore the traditional heavy clothes of an English gentleman accustomed to large, draughty rooms in Victorian country houses. According to his account books, these included merino wool undergarments, a high-necked shirt and cravat, “shooting coat & double breasted waistcoat,” wool trousers, sometimes a knitted shawl or overcoat on top, and in the evenings a brightly coloured silk dressing-gown and flannel nightshirt. Fires smouldered in the grates throughout the year.

  Last but not least, Darwin was addicted to nicotine in the form of snuff. He acknowledged the extent of his dependence, and off and on made half-hearted efforts to restrict his intake. His wife recorded somewhat doubtfully in her old age that she thought he did manage to give it up once for nearly a year before backsliding. He took two sorts, one dubbed an “evil, dark Lundy Foot” by a servant, which made the maids sneeze when they swept the floor.7 He liked this best. For a long time he kept his snuff-jar in the hall, a little distance away from his study door. The inconvenience of getting up and stopping whatever he was doing would, he hoped, regulate the habit. This gambit never worked. He would invent foolishly pressing reasons to pass through the hall (“the drawing-room fire needs stoking”) and, as the children recalled, the clunk of the lid always gave him away.8

  Another trick involved two flights of stairs: for six months Darwin locked his snuff in the cellar and kept the key in an attic room. Even so, Parslow kept meeting him on the servants’ staircase. In the end he resolved that he would take snuff only if he was away from home—“a most satisfactory arrangement for me,” said his friend Innes, because Darwin started to call by for a chat much more often.9 His reliance on snuff probably added to the restless nights. The large pinch that the children remembered him taking before bedtime was not the best way to calm restless thoughts. He drank coffee, too, “at 4:30 every day.” But Dr. Andrew Clark made him give it up in the 1870s.10

  With all these ailments to manage, if not conquer, Darwin’s preferred solution was to keep quiet at home. “For the last two years I have led the life of a hermit,” he told his old Cambridge University friend Charles Whitley before going to Malvern, “seeing no one & going nowhere; & doing nothing but two or three hours work daily on my good days at natural history.”

  I am become that most wretched & despicable object, a confirmed valetudinarian. I have much, very much to be thankful for in life; but everyone has his heavy drawbacks & my own health & even more that of my children is our sore drawback. For years we have had one or other of our children invalids. But I have said enough & more than enough.11

  It fell to Hooker to ask the obvious question: “Do you actually throw up, or is it retching?” It was both, Darwin replied, but food hardly ever came up. “You ask after my sickness—it rarely comes on till 2 or 3 hours after eating, so that I seldom throw up food, only acid & morbid secretion.” Elsewhere he said, “What I vomit [is] intensely acid, slimy (sometimes bitter), corrodes teeth.” Doctors puzzled, he added.12 Hooker did not venture a diagnosis. Nor did Huxley, or any of Darwin’s closest medically trained friends. Their medical training had not led them into clinical practice, although they offered sympathy and advice.

  Still, there was evidently much more to his illness than vomiting alone. Darwin himself was at a loss to explain his continued afflictions, sometimes saying that he had first gone “wrong” during the Beagle voyage and since then had got steadily worse, a kind of perpetual seasickness. He told Edward Lane that his condition might be a result of the bout of sickness he had experienced in Valparaiso. Harriet Martineau said much the same, following Dr. Henry Holland’s impression. As the decades wore on, however, Darwin mostly blamed his spinal cord or nervous system, or his “accursed stomach,” or just simply “nerves.” He tended to think that long periods of intense mental effort would terminate in an attack of illness, and often said that his stomach operated in opposition to his head. This was not such a bad thing. “I know well that my head would have failed years ago, had not my stomach always saved me from a minute’s over work.” Too much thinking, or too much talking, he declared, would usually end in physical disarray.

  But he also said that his work was the only thing that made him forget the pain. When he concentrated on a difficult piece of writing, or an intricate experiment, he became oblivious to everything else, and it was this that made him reluctant to obey doctors’ advice to reduce his scientific undertakings. Time spent away from his work was anathema. He would bargain with Emma over their holidays, shaving away a morning here or an afternoon there, or agreeing to go only if he could take some potted plants for experiments or proof sheets to read. When one of his sons asked whether Darwin might take a rest away from home, he replied that “the truth was he was never quite comfortable except when utterly absorbed in his writing.” He “dreaded” idleness.13 Nevertheless, he apparently recognised something of a vicious circle in all this. He wanted to work, and his work helped him rise above his illness, yet it was work that made him ill. He spoke of holidays as if they were a punishment for the enjoyment he found in his work, or as an unavoidable balancing of his physical status quo, a personal accounting system, in which he must sacrifice a few days in order to squeeze more labour out of his fragile frame.

  How far all this was linked to the disruptive contents of evolutionary theory, or to his defence of the Origin of Species, is hard to say. These factors must have played a leading part, filling his days with obstacles and worries.14 He must have thought about his wife’s religious views, remembering the letter she wrote to him soon after their marriage about her faith, on which he had written, “When I am dead, know that many times I have kissed & cryed over this. C.D.” In a more recent letter she had told him how she believed “suffering & illness is meant to help us exalt our minds & to look forward with hope to a future state.” This Darwin knew he could not do. How could a good God impose suffering? He could not share her faith or subscribe to the belief that suffering led to redemption.

  Even without the religious dilemmas in which he found himself, either at home with Emma or in the larger world with Asa Gray, Kingsley, Wilberforce, and the rest, he was beginnin
g to buckle under the strain. Always, he was writing, writing, writing. He stretched himself further than was realistic in his correspondence. He read the reviews, worrying over every minor point, feeling he should be able to account for each detail of natural selection, for each detail of the encyclopedia of life. People asked him about the existence of God, the origin of living beings, the nature of the human mind, or wrote to abuse him, repeating in personal form much of the Victorian era’s larger apprehension about the reshaping of the natural world. Darwin responded to every one.

  In these illnesses, Darwin was also a man of his time.15 Thomas Carlyle, George Eliot, Charles Dickens, Florence Nightingale, George Biddel Airy (the Astronomer Royal), Huxley, Wallace, Spencer, Lewes, Hooker, and plenty of less well-known individuals endured similar digestive complaints, including his brother Erasmus. The “demon of dyspepsia” was an archetypal Victorian preoccupation on which medical and pharmaceutical fortunes could safely be built. Darwin experienced maladies that were widespread and typical of his era.

  He was similarly not alone in experiencing crushing bouts of nervous exhaustion. His friend Huxley was one of many individuals whose occasional breakdowns are generally forgotten today. Even so, Darwin scarcely showed the impenetrable misery, hopelessness, mental distortions, or inability to participate in normal existence that are the usual clinical signs of depression. To be sure, his disorders might be considered psychiatric or psychosomatic in a colloquial sense. Grief and guilt surely played their part in his psyche. Fear, too, especially in the way his body would most often fail when he intended making a public appearance, suggesting some deep-seated dread of exposure. His customary reticence may have reflected a wish to avoid getting involved with other people’s emotions—reticence and modesty could have been the polite face of dissociation, the spurning of closeness. If Darwin had been a woman, for instance, he might well have been dubbed hysteric, a disorder tied up with a restricted female role in a masculine universe. If he had fallen ill further towards the end of the century he might have been called neurasthenic, a victim of modernity and the hastening pace of life. The terminology he employed, of a “complete breakdown in health,” although vague, is probably appropriate enough.

  And as several contemporaries remarked, ill health presented a number of advantages for a Victorian intellectual. Bad health excused Darwin from boring evenings at scientific societies and from talking to people he did not wish to meet. It sanctioned his retreat after dinner for some tranquil minutes alone with the newspaper. It allowed him to give the best hours of the day to his work. A weak stomach provided an excellent reason for avoiding social engagements, for it was a much more meaningful excuse to offer than an attack of unmentionable boils. Indefinable stomach pains also created ideal circumstances for restorative mornings at Down House, with Emma or Henrietta in solicitous attendance, and signalled a convenient cut-off point for conversations with guests. These mildly self-indulgent aspects of Darwin’s middle life are readily comprehensible. His need for peace and quiet occasionally took the form of genteel indisposition, a pattern of existence characterised by Nietzsche as “freedom from good health.” Others of the same social background might have visited Madeira for the winter season or tried water-colour painting in the Highlands.

  Emma colluded with these social excuses.

  She used to go and scold him for working too long, and would warn him he was talking too long with guests, etc. This part was very useful to him as it gave him an easy way of leaving the room before he was tired out. He would tell her beforehand that she was to send him away early.16

  Underneath it all, sickness was by now an integral part of his married life, a time for being the centre of Emma’s attention. The benefits worked both ways. Emma was moved by his dependence on her when he was ill, and he expressed his love for her much more freely under sickroom circumstances. “She has been my greatest blessing.… She has never failed in the kindest sympathy towards me, and has borne with the utmost patience my frequent complaints from ill-health and discomfort.” Although it seems hard to believe that she did not get irritated with him, he praised her sympathetic manner throughout his life.

  Perhaps there were advantages for her too. Illness brought him out of his study into the drawing room. When he was ill he spent much more time in Emma’s company than usual, listening to her reading or playing the piano, sometimes having his back massaged or his scalp rubbed.17 As soon as he felt well enough, he would be off back to his work—and it is worth noting that as a consequence Emma and the children customarily saw Darwin only when he was too sick to do anything else except join the family. To some extent this feature of his life partly explains his wife’s and children’s emphasis on his ill health in their reminiscences.

  Darwin, in turn, undoubtedly found bad health an effective way to claim his wife’s undivided attention. Her days were otherwise much given to the children, to relatives, and to household and village concerns.18 “She could hardly endure doing nothing even for a quarter of an hour,” reminisced Henrietta.19 Such fugitive disorders, as novelists like Elizabeth Gaskell recognised, could easily become the primary means of social interaction.

  III

  What is certain is that he became worse from the autumn of 1863. He returned to Downe from Malvern with a note from Dr. Gully about a new bathing routine and started cold baths, with Parslow acting as his bathman. But he gave up soon after, and never again bothered with water therapy.

  Impatient for progress, he approached Dr. Jenner for more medication. He also turned for advice again to George Busk. This time, Busk thought his problem might be mechanical—the stomach did not push on its contents as rapidly as it ought to do.20 Busk gave him the name of William Brinton of St. Thomas’s Hospital in London, the author of a book on ulcers and stomach diseases. Even so, Darwin did not consult Brinton without first talking it through with Stephen Engleheart (“Spengle”), the doctor for Downe village, whom he saw on a regular basis. “They are in rather a pick of troubles about which Dr. to have,” wrote Henrietta to William. “Dr Gully has sent to Dr Jenner, but Spengle strongly recommends a Dr Brinton, so they don’t know what to do.” Engleheart wondered about the possibility of water-borne infections, a common cause of disease. For a week or two Darwin worried about the state of his drains.

  Much of this elaborate procedure revealed just how influential Darwin was becoming. He could afford the best therapeutic help, and the doctors were in their turn keen to offer their services to a celebrated scientific man. Physicians, for example, mostly came to Darwin. All of Darwin’s medical consultations took place at Darwin’s convenience, in a private, domestic environment, either at his own home, by correspondence, or at the house of his medical adviser. None of his ill health was experienced in a hospital setting, and as was customary for people of his social standing, nursing care was provided by his womenfolk, sometimes for long periods. The practical arrangements for the care of a sick man—the nursing, special diets, sending for prescriptions, and medical attendance—were part of a wife’s duty as manager of the Victorian household. Yet in essence, Darwin, as the patient, controlled the medical show. He felt no scruple over consulting three or four physicians simultaneously and was prepared to ignore their advice or turn to another if treatment failed. He kept his village doctor on hand and made supplementary inquiries of medically trained friends or relatives like his brother Erasmus or Henry Holland. At any one moment there could be several well-qualified people giving him advice of one kind or another and recommending different drugs and diets.

  In short, Darwin came to treat his illness as if it were a natural history problem and he were setting out on some complex research project, asking everyone he knew for second and third opinions, reading around the subject, experimenting here and there, bombarding colleagues with inquiries, finding out everything he could, and reorganising his hypotheses to accommodate new information. The old adage about doctors making the worst patients seemingly held true for naturalists as well.
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  And it is entirely possible that these disorders in part became a crutch to him. He may have come to enjoy the medical attention and the rituals of dietary restrictions, and have been stimulated by the pursuit of one therapy after another as he sought an all-embracing cure, rather in the same manner as he relentlessly pursued botanical or zoological facts. He may have come to rely on being able to shelter behind an illness which allowed him to escape commitments, intellectual and domestic alike.

  As he worsened, Emma seized her chance and took over completely. Previously little more than a ghost in his working life, she took Darwin firmly in hand and made her presence felt. For a few months in 1864 she transformed Down House into a sanatorium. She discouraged visitors. She or Henrietta dealt with all Darwin’s correspondence and sat for dictation at his bedside. She regulated his invalid hours, told him when to get up or to stay in bed, monitored his daily walks, was constantly on hand to read novels to him or to offer a nourishing cup of beef tea. As frequently happens in the domestic arena, illness provided her with an opportunity to pick up the reins of authority. Emma became Darwin’s nurse, keeper, and mother, the real ruler of the establishment, conscious of her role in his life, willing to give him the care he needed, and receive his gratitude in return. As well as being the pliable, endlessly supportive person of his recollections, she here showed the strength of her character and a certain satisfaction in taking charge.