Darwin and the Barnacle

by Rebecca Stott

  Then, with more clatters and splashes, the Bath Man is gone, leaving Darwin pinioned helplessly, damp and confined, to the bed. One and a half hours he has been prescribed for this wet-sheet wrap; one and a half hours, and it still isn’t fully light. Quarter past six in the morning. How preposterous. If only Hooker could see him now. He still owes his friend a letter, he remembers guiltily. He should have responded more quickly to that last letter from Darjeeling, with its delicate diagrams of the precipices and glacial spurs of the Himalayan Mountains. In it Hooker, searching for similarities in their now very different lives, explained that Darjeeling was also a kind of sanatorium. The whole ridge of Darjeeling had been purchased from the Sikkim Rajah by the East India Company in 1835 as a European refuge from the fierce heat of the Indian plains. Seven thousand feet above sea level, it was perfect for replicating the temperature, if not the climate, of London.2 By 1849 a road had been put in place through the jungle slopes and the population had grown from 100 to 10,000 people; but political relations had always been unstable and Hooker had had to use the political agent in Darjeeling, Dr Campbell, to negotiate with the Sikkim Rajah on his behalf for permission to collect botanical specimens in his country. From Darjeeling, Hooker described heading off into the mountains, camping in the snow and in abandoned Buddhist temples, watching the sunrise break on the mountains and sketching the shapes of precipitous valleys and gorges all around him. He was, he crowed, in positively robust health – ‘never was so well in my life’ – but, he added quickly, he would gladly share his good health with his sick friend back home. And the sexual habits of the barnacles that Darwin had described so excitedly in his letter of the previous October were still in Hooker’s mind, even at this altitude, though now wrapped about with other anthropological observations: ‘The Supplemental males of the Barnacles are really wonderful, though the supplemental males in the Bhothea families (a wife may have 10 husbands by law) have rather distracted my attention of late from cirripedes & from our old lubrications.’3

  16 The Wet Sheet

  Along the corridors at the other end of the house Darwin can hear the baby, Francis, squalling and the sound of doors banging. Brodie will be preparing the baby’s breakfast. He is being weaned from his mother’s milk and he is not happy. No one else is awake yet, except George. Darwin can hear George’s characteristic and exasperating twanging noises, made by the little jingling organ with wires stretched inside that Emma bought him a few days before down at the toy bazaar in the town. George, determined to see how it works, is taking it apart, piece by piece, down in the hallway somewhere.4 Emma will sleep longer yet – that is, if she can sleep through George’s noisy dissections. Mrs Thorley, the governess, will give the older children their lessons and then has promised them a donkey ride today with Emma, over the hills to St Anne’s Well, the cold-water spring. Emma and Annie in particular are happy and relaxed; they share a love for the music here, the weekly piano and orchestral recitals and the jaunty polkas and waltzes played in Dr Wilson’s ballroom. Annie, his beloved Annie, will want to hear all about this morning’s tortures. She will look at him again with wide-eyed incredulity:

  Gradually, without his really noticing it, Darwin’s body is getting warmer. The sheets are already tepid. He has conquered the cold. He is indeed beginning to ‘feel the benefits’. Mr Gully has high hopes for his health. Nervous dyspepsia, he diagnosed confidently, when Darwin arrived for the first consultation in early March. The Water Cure is strict, he explained sternly. You have to take it seriously or it won’t work its way. That means no sugar, salt, rich foods or stimulants. No writing, no work, minimal reading – absolutely no exertions to the brain. He would have to give up alcohol and snuff. Darwin’s heart sank. He’d known this, of course, but the snuff prohibition was the worst of all.

  It wasn’t that he was unprepared. He’d read Gully’s book when it had arrived by post from London and carefully marked it up, so he knew what to expect: ‘Let no one attempt the systematic water treatment who is unwilling or unable to rid himself, for the time being, of business and botherations.’5 But back in January he’d been desperate for anything, no matter how bizarre, to cure him of the constant pain and vomiting. He’d have given up anything – even snuff – but not the barnacles. They came to Malvern, too, he insisted, with his microscopes and notebooks. He couldn’t stop now. His barnacle work had suffered from his unending sickness. But Gully refused; the barnacles were part of the problem: they were making him ill.

  Darwin had been to see his cousin, the famous Dr Henry Holland in Harley Street, at some considerable expense in search of a cure for his mysterious illness, but Dr Holland had been baffled, vague in his diagnosis of ‘suppressed gout’. Dr James Gully, though always circumspect, had been clear in his diagnosis and positive that he could effect at least some change; and the Water Cure was simple and harmless enough. It wasn’t going to kill him. It couldn’t make things any worse. After all, in February he had turned forty; something had to be done to improve his health. ‘We’ll be working with the curative powers of nature not artificial drugs,’ Gully had said on that first day. Powerful words. Darwin had liked him from the start. They talked of Edinburgh. Though they’d not met before, they’d been contemporaries in the Medical Faculty and were almost the same age. Gully had followed Darwin’s career in the medical and scientific journals, was interested in his current work and looked forward to some interesting conversations about comparative anatomy. It was some time since he had undertaken any dissections, he laughed. The poet Alfred Tennyson had been through the Water Cure most beneficially the year before, he told Darwin, and they had often spoken of the new ideas in natural philosophy. Tennyson had been particularly keen to discuss the implications of the new book Vestiges. He was using some of the ideas in a new poem he was writing.6

  17 Dr Gully

  Gully was unorthodox. His Water Cure sometimes included homeopathy and mesmerism as well as hydropathy. The essence of the Cure was simple, he wrote in his popular book of 1846, The Water Cure in Chronic Disease – it focused on making the body’s natural energies heal itself. Darwin’s body and mind had been abused by too much stimulation, too much thinking, Gully said when they had met in Malvern in March, and Darwin was now suffering from nervous dyspepsia. His nervous system was in complete disarray. It was no wonder that his body was complaining, retching, producing sores and swellings. It was its way of saying, ‘Enough.’ He’d come to the right place, Gully had said. The Water Cure would restore his body and spirit to its natural, unpolluted state in no time with vigorous exercise, daily cold douches and wrappings, plenty of Malvern water to drink and simple foods to eat: ‘Nature, entirely freed from the unwholesome operation of diet, drugs, mental cares, &c, would certainly be left in the best possible position for reassuming her healthy actions.’7

  Darwin was to leave his books behind, especially novels. Gully felt as strongly about the digestion of novels as he did about overrich food. Four weeks of the Cure would change the depraved appetites of even the most decadent of readers. ‘I have seen men’, he wrote, ‘whose jaded and morbid minds could previously take no nutrient save the garbage of English and French novels, devour the strong meat of History and Biography with keen and large appetite.’8

  Gully was strict: ‘The physician’, he had told Darwin, ‘should control, not pander to, his patient.’9 Darwin must rest his brain if his stomach was to improve. The cold-water baths and rubbing would induce a better distribution of the blood throughout the body. For most of his patients, he explained, their troubles had started with the over-consumption of rich foods. This in its turn had caused the body’s blood supply to collect around the digestive organs and became diseased. All the cold water and dry rubs would increase the circulation, draw off the bad blood and help the body regain its natural vitality and vigour.

  Darwin is now feeling very warm and begins to sleep again. It is still quiet outside in the street as the sun rises. All over the small hill town, with its white sto
ne buildings, in the bedrooms of private lodging houses, in Dr Wilson’s establishment at the Crown Hotel in Abbey Road and Dr Gully’s establishment at Holyrood House in Wells Road, people young and old, male and female, are being scrubbed down by Bath Attendants or wrapped up in wet sheets like Darwin. In an hour or so they will be sent out on to the hillside to walk briskly for an hour, clasping crystal-glass tumblers so that they can drink the required number of glasses of spring water from the marble fountains at the wells before breakfast, filling themselves up like water casks. The more infirm ride donkeys, and up at the tops of the hills, local girls sell bags of walnuts, biscuits, pears and ginger beer.10 Some are very sick indeed and balanced precariously on donkeys led by servants; they look beyond recovery, though Wilson and Gully continue to fight to reinvigorate their weakened bodies from the after-effects of cholera, scarlet fever, typhoid. As the journalist Joseph Leech described in his book Three Weeks in Wet Sheets: The Diary and Doings of a Moist Visitor to Malvern, ‘at Malvern, you met people old and yellow, and shrivelled and sapless … the body had become a mere shell for the vital spark to smoulder in…’11

  The Bath Man is back carrying more pails and more water. Darwin wakes rather too quickly from a deep and dreamless sleep to find himself being unwrapped, like a melon in a forcing bed. Then the whole regime begins again, just like every other morning, he writes to his sister. It’s all very strange yet surprisingly pleasant:

  Am scrubbed with rough towel in cold water for 2 or 3 minutes, which after the first few days, made & makes me very like a lobster – I have a washerman, a very nice person, & he scrubs behind, whilst I scrub in front. – drink a tumbler of water & get my clothes on as quickly as possible & walk for 20 minutes … At the same time I put on a compress, which is a broad wet folded linen covered by mackintosh & which is ‘refreshed’ – ie dipt in cold water every 2 hours & I wear it all day.12

  Neptune’s Girdle: a wet compress strapped to the stomach. Almost all the patients in Malvern wore it all day, up and down the hills, drinking water at the wells, playing bridge or whist in the afternoons and at mealtimes as described by Joseph Leech: ‘Anybody you meet … like yourself, is steaming with moisture – however gorgeous the old dowager is dressed at night, she’s in reality underneath as moist as a frog – the fair young beauty is but a water-lily up to her arms in that element, and the currie-eating old Indian is hissing like an urn-iron in a full suit of swaddling clothes.’13

  Although Dr Wilson allowed his guests to mingle freely at mealtimes, Dr Gully was more strict. No stimulation of any kind, he insisted, and he segregated the male and female patients in his care into two establishments joined by a bridge, nicknamed by his patients ‘the Bridge of Sighs’. It was also a matter of privacy and decency, he wrote: ‘By means of the bath attendants (and the uneducated will babble) the infirmities of females are liable to become known to everybody.’14

  Darwin, increasingly reclusive and dependent on his family, could not bear the idea of such a public-school-like establishment and rented an entire house for the duration. It was expensive, but at least he could vomit in private.15 Here, though, at the Lodge, the routines were monastic compared even to the regimes of Down. Thomas Carlyle, who visited Dr Gully’s establishment in the summer of 1851, reflected in a letter to Ralph Waldo Emerson: ‘It is a strange quasi-monastic – godless and yet devotional – way of life which human creatures have here, and useful to them beyond doubt. I forsee this “water cure”, under better forms, will become the Ramadhan of the overworked unbelieving English in time coming, an institution they were dreadfully in want of, this long while.’16

  For the Darwin children this was an extraordinary and exciting time. Henrietta, who was now five years old, remembered long afterwards the exact place in the road near Down where she was told that the whole family was to move together to Malvern.17 The clarity of that memory was a measure, she recollected, of the very quiet life they led at Down. The Malvern house and countryside were full of new adventures for the children – streams cut through the mountain sides, a fountain in the garden that trickled from marble into a large stone basin, and a garden that opened on to the mountain side – more drama than Down. Beyond The Lodge there was a town full of strange people carrying tumblers of water and standing to discuss their cures on street corners. Everywhere up there on the mountain, everywhere the children turned, there were more and more pale, smartly dressed people, carrying tumblers of water; and there were rows of charmingly doe-eyed donkeys in the main street at the Donkey Exchange, forty or fifty of them with white cotton cloths covering their side saddles, each with its name embroidered across its forehead band. Next to the Donkey Exchange was Henry Lamb’s Royal Library and Bazaar, where the children would run their fingers across the books, toys and stationery and the polished white ivory of the pianofortes. William went for lessons with a clergyman who took in pupils at the Ankardine House Academy and Annie, who loved music, had dancing lessons at a Dancing Academy at Pomona House.

  Meanwhile, the children continued to hear their father’s growls about his privations and discomforts. In a letter to her sister-in-law Emma described overhearing little Annie telling her governess that the Water Cure ‘makes Papa so angry’, as if this anger were part of the treatment itself.18 His anger, though, was very much mixed with pleasures: ‘I like all this very much,’ he wrote. He even derived pleasures from the notorious douche bath, a thunderous deluge of mountain water that was rigged up in a series of little wooden huts in the garden. Joseph Leech, the journalist, also described the strange mixture of rapture and terror that the douche inspired:

  18 Douche

  The man pulled the string, a momentary rush, like a thunderstorm, was heard above me, and the next second the water came roaring through the pipe like a lion upon its prey, and struck me on the shoulder with a merciless bang, spinning me about like a teetotum … like a cataract the strong column broke in foamy splinters to the ground, I felt like one who fought a great sea monster … For a minute and a half I remained under this water spout, buffeting fiercely, until the cold column had cudgelled me as hot as a coal – aye, black and blue too; but good gracious! What a glorious luxury – a nervous but still ecstatic luxury, that made you cry out at once in terror and rapture … I had to content myself with yelling the wild Irish war whoop of the O’Donoghues.19

  Then there were the lamp-baths in which Darwin, like Leech, sat on a stool over a lighted lamp, wrapped in sheets. As the lamp warmed the wet sheets, Leech explained, the patient began to sweat profusely:

  Suddenly, as though it could bear no more, the skin opened its pores like so many flood gates, and I ran like a shoulder of mutton before the fire, or a candle held over it. It was no moderate moisture – it was a torrent, and as it fell from my forehead on my nose like rain, it tickled me terribly, but my hands were under the blankets, and I could not help myself. My bath-man looked on me in these my first melting moments, with the eye of an artist. ‘It’s coming beautifully,’ he said with rapture.20

  During these long treatments, these periods of pinioned indolence, Darwin was trying to resolve the classification problems that now faced him as he prepared to pull all his notes together for the first barnacle volume. The classification of barnacles was in a ‘perfect chaos’, he wrote to the Professor of Anatomy and Physiology of Berlin in February. Those who had gone before him had made an absolute mess of their systems of naming. ‘Literally not one species is properly defined … The subject is heart-breaking.’21 Sometimes they gave the newly discovered barnacle several names; sometimes they named it incorrectly. Usually they were so concerned to have their own names appended to the new genus, like a flag marking the ownership of a new island (Ibla cumingii for instance, after its discoverer Hugh Cuming), that they didn’t bother to get the first species name properly defined. If they had been more concerned with defining not naming, Darwin complained, his job would have been made considerably easier. He wrote to Hugh Strickland, a geologist and zoologist who h
ad started a campaign to change the naming systems in January: ‘The sooner … an author’s name [is] buried in oblivion the better… A naturalist shd let his reputation rest, not on the number of the species he describes, but on the general importance of his services to Nat. Hist.’22 Some of these men acted as if they had ‘actually made the species, & it was their own property,’ he raved.23

  Although Strickland could see his arguments and accept them to some extent, many others wouldn’t Hooker, from the Himalayas, warned Darwin to be careful or he would get into ‘hot water’. ‘You have plenty enough to trouble you,’ he said. ‘Naturalists are of the genus irritabili – we have associated amongst the exceptions chiefly: but the swarm of snobs with various qualification & claims for fame & who seek fame alone is still very great & by Jove old Darwin they will be down on you like Sikhs if you do not look out.’24 Darwin shouldn’t take on the swarms of snobs, he reasoned, for the conflicts would be messy and protracted – quite ungentlemanly. However, if he were to let well alone, they were sure to find that the walls of their systems would fell simply through the sheer weight of the new species that were being described. Later that year Darwin abandoned the fight, but whilst at Malvern he remembered being ‘foolish and rabid against species mongers’.25