by Nick Webb
Evolution had fascinated him from his schooldays. Intellectually the pump had long been primed for his friendship with Professor Richard Dawkins. It was a true meeting of minds when they got together in 1990. At one point, Douglas had even contemplated taking a mature student’s degree in zoology (it would have been one of his worthier displacement activities). Richard dissuaded him: Douglas was an inspired scientific generalist with an imagination far too effervescent for the sometimes grindingly repetitive nature of scientific procedure. His broad perspective would not be well served by the tight focus of a single discipline.
The notion of God had appealed to Douglas when he was a schoolboy. God is, after all, the solution—transmitted to us by culture and tradition—to those big questions that trouble an enquiring mind. Douglas had worked in the school chapel and sung his heart out in the choir. But his religious impulse was really a search for meaning—and that is by no means the sole prerogative of those immersed in the organized religions. Indeed, by the time he was a student, the institutional answers to the question of meaning had become irrelevant. Once you have the dimmest inkling of the scale of the universe, the idea that a huge one of us (we humans being made in His image) created it all in order to place us in it becomes preposterous. Douglas lost his faith, he said, at the age of eighteen, when he heard a street evangelist and realized that what was being said made absolutely no sense at all. The great French mathematician, Laplace, dedicated his Treatise on Celestial Mechanics to Napoleon. “Merci,” said Bonaparte, but then added that he was surprised that Laplace had made no mention of God. “Sire,” Laplace is supposed to have replied (only in French), “I found I had no need to avail myself of that hypothesis.”
Douglas had no need for the hypothesis either. Indeed, he agreed with his friend, Richard Dawkins, whose book, The Selfish Gene, had such an influence on Douglas when he read it years later, that there is something sentimental and self-deceiving about any notion that puts man centre stage. “Space,” after all, “is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mindbogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it is a long way down to the chemist, but that’s just peanuts to space.”* 14
Douglas was a radical atheist,* 15 and quite unequivocal about using the term. If someone had suggested that he take Pascal’s bet and recant on his deathbed to be on the safe side, he would have rejected such an indignity* 16 He really did mean “atheist” and not agnostic. The more he learned, the stronger his atheism became—but this was nothing as crude as replacing one paradigm with another.
One of the slanders frequently addressed to atheists is that their view of the world is mechanistic and reductive—a long, cold chain of materially determined consequences with each iron link of cause and effect stretching back to the Big Bang. Where in this account, argue the believers, is there room for spirit or free will? But Douglas thought that imputing such a position to atheists was absurd.* 17 The more you know about how the world works, the more astonishingly wonderful it becomes.
His way of looking at things is infectious.
For instance, you are reading a book, a rectangular block of laminated wood pulp. Some huge vegetable, probably grown in a Scandinavian monoculture where no birds sing, has been harvested so that its fibre can be chemically and mechanically treated to make paper. Oil-based pigment has been squeezed onto the paper by machines. The resulting black marks are intended to convey information using an invention, language, so creative that it can generate sentences like this one which has probably never been written before in the history of the species. With luck you will still find it intelligible. If the wood-pulp tree were still standing, you’d want to lean against it.
In terms of quantum physics, you and the book are mostly empty space consisting of infinitesimally tiny nuclei surrounded by clouds of electrons whizzing round in (relative to the nucleus) hugely distant and ultimately unknowable orbital clouds that nevertheless can only possess discrete values. The nuclei contain still smaller components, and their numbers determine what you’re made of. All but the very lightest elements in your body were synthesized in the thermonuclear hearts of stars and blasted into the universe by explosion. You’re at the bottom of the gravity well of a planet that is moving at nineteen miles a second around its solar central heating unit that is one star of about a hundred billion in the local system. Gravity is—by millions of orders of magnitude—the weakest of all the binding forces of the cosmos, but it weighs heavily on you because you’re so tiny compared to the mass of our planet. What’s more, you’re living in a thin envelope of dangerously reactive gases. You don’t give this a moment’s thought because, of course, you know all this is normal. Douglas didn’t.* 18
But Douglas was not wide-eyed about science. He would not believe any old tosh because it made for a frisson-inducing yarn. As a good positivist he thought that you had to be entitled to believe a proposition on the basis of proper evidence. In many interviews he was asked what he would have done if he hadn’t been a writer, a job at which he excelled but for which he was temperamentally one of the least well-suited people on Earth. His usual answer was software engineer/designer, a blend of science and technology that marries up extreme care with wild creativity. Douglas had no time for soggy science of the “Was God a chair-leg?/Aliens made the pyramids” variety. Rather like his beloved Bach, whose music conveys emotion while adhering to strict musical forms, Douglas believed that the appeal of science was all the greater if it were methodologically rigorous, careful and difficult. In his opinion:
Revolutionary changes to accepted models quite often come from outside the orthodoxy of any given discipline, but if a new idea is to prevail it has to be better supported in argument, logic and evidence than the old view, not worse. “Feel-good” science is not science at all. Science Fiction is a great territory in which to play with the kind of perspective shifts that lead to new discoveries and new realizations. But imagination tempered with logic and reason is much more powerful than imagination alone.* 19
Douglas Adams had a gift for making us look again at the world and see how strange it really is. You remember those quizzes in comics and magazines when something is drawn from an odd angle or photographed from an unusual perspective? The circle with a thin bar projecting diametrically from either side that turns out to be a bicycling Mexican wearing a big hat seen from above? Douglas’s writing pulls a similar trick.
There ought to be a unit of pleasure to describe that moment when a joke or a sudden insight makes you see something clearly in a way you had never thought of before. In Douglas’s honour such moments should be calibrated in Adamses, using the S.I. system. Femto-adamses for tiny but amusing surprises, right up to Tera-adamses for sickening lurches in world view. His ability to stand sideways on to the world, and think “that’s bloody peculiar” informs all his writing. He urged us to think differently, to take our eyes out for a walk.
Of course, very few live up there in the stratosphere of human thought all the time. Astronomers, their minds on the transcendent, live in torment in case a rival team publishes in the right scholarly journal first. It’s comfortingly human. Our minds may encompass infinite space, but we still worry about status, sex and the milk bill.
Douglas Adams did enjoy an intense inner life of the mind—while he wasn’t throwing parties and going to restaurants, that is. But his sense of wonder never left him.
ONE
Not from Guildford After All
“The main problem which the medical profession in the most advanced sectors of the galaxy had to tackle after cures had been found for all the major diseases, and instant repair systems had been invented for all physical injuries and disablements except some of the more advanced forms of death, was that of employment.
“Planets full of bronzed healthy clean-limbed individuals merrily prancing through their lives meant that the only doctors still in business were the psychiatrists, simply because no one had discovered a cure for the universe as a whole—or rather the
one that did exist had been abolished by the medical doctors.”
THE NARRATOR, FIT THE ELEVENTH,
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
It was half a century and a world away. In Britain, the 1950s were not famously colourful. If the nineties were a decade when everything had inverted commas around it, the fifties were like sitting through The Mousetrap over and over again in some church hall with rock-hard seats. You would say “as joyous as the fifties” about as often as you’d remark that something was as droll as a Bergman season.
Internationally, Eva Peron, “the mother of Argentina,” died in 1952. Great swathes of Africa were still under European colonial rule. The Korean War ended in 1953 having cost almost three million lives. President Eisenhower was in the White House (twice), while Americans got richer and their cars, already the size of cathedrals, became larger and finnier with every passing year.
British society was one of those bottles of fizz that feel as hard as teak until the top is unscrewed and the pressure released. Dr. Jonathan Miller, the director, writer and polymath, thinks that in many ways the fifties were a social extension of the thirties with habits of deference that did not change until a decade later.* 20 A certain strangulated gentility ruled, especially in the suburbs whose sprawl had been contained by “green belt” legislation just in time to prevent the whole of southern Britain below a line from the Wash to Cardigan Bay from becoming a housing estate.
Car ownership was only for the well-off. Television was grainy and black and white (405 lines to the screen and not today’s 625), and it was by no means universal. The sets themselves were huge brown boxes containing valves that took a minute to warm up and stored energy long enough for a strange white dot to fade slowly from the screen when the power was turned off.
Despite their room-crushing dimensions, TVs had hanky-sized screens in front of which free-standing magnifiers could be placed. There were two channels, and on the BBC continuity gaps were filled with footage of a potter’s hands shaping a clay vase. Spiffing chaps in dinner jackets or county women in evening dress would announce the next programme with voices of crystal-etching upper-class Oxbridge English.
The fifties were a time of damp gabardine macintoshes, ugly haircuts, hideously uncomfortable clothes, stodgy food, buildings of fashionable brutality inspired by scaled-up packets of cornflakes, and suffocating disapproval.* 21 Beneath the surface all was churning. Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim pierced the phoney moralizing with randy glee in 1954,* 22 and John Osborne excoriated the stultifying hypocrisy of it all in Look Back in Anger (1956). But on the surface an oppressive and paralysing respectability prevailed.
In Cambridge in early 1951, Janet Donovan met Christopher Douglas Adams, who was twenty-four at the time. Janet was a nurse at Addenbrookes, the famous Cambridge hospital. She was rather pretty, then as now a pragmatic woman with a sympathetic, no-nonsense manner. Despite being a staple of Mills and Boon romances, nurses tend not to be soppy. After all, if your daily routine consists of dealing with the ill and cantankerous public and its leaky orifices, soppiness could not survive for long. It was an unlikely liaison, but Janet was swept off her feet by the fascinating Christopher Adams. They quickly married (in Wisbech), and on 11 March 1952 Janet gave birth to Douglas Noël Adams, an infant hominid whose unusual intelligence would not be manifest for quite a while. Indeed, he was a markedly late developer in all but size, being a whopper even as a baby. Douglas’s first name has a certain dynastic inevitability. Later one of his stock jokes was that he (initials DNA) arrived in Cambridge nine months before J.D. Watson and Francis Crick worked out the double helix structure of deoxyribonucleic acid.* 23
When somebody as extraordinary as Douglas Adams appears, there’s a temptation to regard him as some kind of happy fluke, rather in the same way that townies imagine that meat never runs about a field but pops into being in sterile packs in huge supermarket refrigerators. But in both cases there is a long line of antecedents.
Doctoring was the family business, and it stretched back to the late eighteenth century. In four generations there were eleven male Dr. Adamses and one woman surgeon. It was a Scottish dynasty of tall, clever men, and one that combined considerable talent with a strong sense of obligation to the public good. Interestingly, quite a few of those Adamses also wrote books, some were inspired teachers and lecturers and nearly all of them—perhaps all, but the records are incomplete—seem to have had an appetite and a gift for public speaking.* 24
The great, great grand-daddy of them all was Alexander Maxwell Adams (1792–1860), who graduated from Edinburgh University and then practised in that city in Argyle Square, now the site of the Museum of Science and Arts. He left three sons who also became doctors. His great-grandson, also Alexander Maxwell Adams, author of a family history published in four parts by the Hamilton Advertiser in 1922, described him—somewhat obscurely quoting Thales* 25—as a man who “took time by the forelock.” He was a popular man, who did a lot of unpaid work for the poorer folk of Edinburgh.
This was what saved him one day in 1828 after a mob mistook him for Dr. Knox, the famous anatomist of Surgeons’ Hall, who had been innocently implicated in the Burke and Hare murders. You will remember that Burke and Hare were the notorious body-snatchers who robbed the graves of the recently dead in order to supply, cash on delivery and no questions, corpses to the local medical school. (You may wonder how much important medical knowledge was hard won in such iffy circumstances.)
Body-snatching was a lucrative business—and one in which unsurprisingly the anatomists favoured good, fresh material—so much so that Burke and Hare were tempted to regulate what the economists call the supply side, by not actually waiting for nature to take its course. They anticipated death, to the extent of murdering some of the rootless people in their own lodging house. Dr. Robert Knox had his suspicions aroused when he saw the body of “Daft Jamie” in the dissecting room, and raised the alarm.
Despite this, the doctor became something of a bogeyman. The mob, returning from despoiling his house, spotted Dr. Adams, mistook him for Knox, and decided to string him up from one of the large brackets used to suspend oil lamps, then the only means of street lighting. Dr. Adams’s expostulations were in vain, the rope was around his neck; it looked very bleak. A century later, Dr. Alexander Maxwell Adams (the fourth) was to describe matters, with that caution that marks a man of science, as “an unpromising position.” Suddenly one of the crowd shouted out: “What! Would ye hang the lang [tall] doctor o’ the south?” Dr. Adams’s practice was south of the Nor’loch.
Dr. Adams survived this flirtation with the grim reaper to live on as a well-respected Edinburgh doctor. He was the author of several textbooks, including A Treatise on Female Complaints, some pretty bad poetry, and a novel, Gamoshka, or Memoirs of the Goodwin Family. However, he was best known for Sketches from the Life of a Physician based on his experiences as a General Practitioner. It’s engagingly written, full of historically interesting detail and suffused with dry humour. For medical men and women it is rightly viewed as a minor classic.
His sons, Dr. Adams, Dr. Adams and Dr. Adams, were all highly regarded. William David had a distinguished career in Edinburgh. Alexander Maxwell (the second of that name) became Professor at Portland Street School of Medicine at the Andersonian University, Glasgow, and then practised in Lanark where he went on to become the Provost of Lanark, a job peculiar to Scotland that, as head of a municipal authority or burgh, carries a lot of responsibility.
James Maxwell Adams (1817–1899), the middle son, also took the road to Glasgow where he built up a large practice in medicine, with added toxicology and engineering.* 26 He invented the Adams Inhaler for Respiratory Diseases, not only more efficient than the previous model but much cheaper to manufacture. He composed many innovative scientific papers on such subjects as heating by gas. (British cities were black with soot from coal fires at the time.) In 1865 his subtle forensic work, which involved devising from scratch a lethality e
xperiment with rabbits and a control group, contributed to the conviction of Dr. Edward Pritchard, who was accused of poisoning not only his mother-in-law but also his wife. The creepy Dr. Pritchard has the unusual distinction of being the last man to be hanged in Glasgow in public.
James was also a writer whose lively mind was manifest in the eclectic range of his publications. Sanitary Aspects of the Sewage Question was not one of his most commercial titles, but he also wrote about cruelty in lion taming, arsine poisoning, and the nutritional and chemical properties of wine. What is it, he wondered—inter alia—that makes the nose go a mottled cerise that betrays the imbiber no matter how excruciatingly tiptoeing his diction?
James was loved by his patients. In 1879, he was a shareholder in the Bank of Glasgow when it failed. Rather like a Lloyd’s Name he had unlimited liability, but in contrast to many Lloyd’s Names he paid up without cavilling even though he had to sell his house in the process. Astonishingly, a group of his friends and patients clubbed together and bought his house back for him, presenting him with the deeds in a fine silver casket* 27
To tell the tales of all the medical Adamses would take too long. Suffice it to say that when Douglas Kinchin Adams (1891–1967), Douglas’s grandfather and possibly the most brilliant doctor of them all, came along in 1891, the tradition of medicine and public duty was already firmly established.
Douglas Kinchin Adams, MB, ChB, MA, BSc, MD, FRCP, was another tall man of ferocious intelligence. “Kinchin” is unusual even in Scotland; it was his mother’s maiden name. Douglas K. Adams plunged into medicine with intellectual passion. He took his Bachelor of Medicine and Surgery degrees with honours, winning First Class Certificates in Midwifery, Surgery, Pathology and Medical Jurisprudence. Then he swiftly got his doctorate. While studying for his medical and surgical qualifications, he thought he’d also study for an MA and a BSc, both of which he acquired with distinction. He also proved his ability in research and practical medicine. In particular he refused to accept that neurological illness was unassailable, and as a result of his painstaking investigations he threw a great deal of light upon a group of nervous diseases called Generically Disseminated Scleroses (which include multiple sclerosis). His MD thesis on the subject won him the rarely awarded Bellahouston gold medal.