Ornithology, Evolution, and Philosophy 123

Health 301
During the following years Mayr became ever more explicit in his denouncement
of the Nazi regime in Germany.
Health
Ernst Mayr enjoyed good health throughout most of his long adult life. As a young
boy, besides all the childhood diseases, he was subject to allergies, e.g., against egg
white (which caused the mucus glands in his mouth to swell) and mildew or house
dust during vacations which occasionally caused severe asthma attacks. However,
after he had reached the age of ten or eleven, he was hardly sick at all. As a youth he
was not a great sports figure but active in soccer games, bicycling, skiing, sprinting,
and volley ball. He did a lot of hiking and bicycling, mostly in connection with
birdwatching. He also did some cross country skiing, when he would take the train
up one of the valleys of the Erzgebirge (south of Dresden), ski across the ridge to
the next valley, and then take the train from there back to Dresden in the evening.
During the last 2 years in the gymnasium he joined the youth division of a local
soccer club (Guts-Muts) and played quite a bit of soccer. His love for this game
stayed with him until his old age, and he always followed the games of the German
soccer leagues, the German soccer championship, and the international soccer
results. When I visited him in September 2003, Mayr greeted me saying “We could
watch today on television the women’s’ soccer world championship if you like.”
We did not do so and thereby missed witnessing the German women winning this
championship. Mayr also had a general interest in American baseball, especially
the teams in New York.
With his fatherly friend Gottfried Schiermann, he went to see several boxing
fights in Berlin. Impressed by his robust health at that time Stresemann mentioned
to Hartert that Mayr “has a very tough body as I noticed during joint field trips
and practicing gymnastics. Are you able to swing your leg over the back of a chair
75 times?” (letter dated 21 September 1928). But, being excessively acrophobic as
a young man, Mayr stayed home when his brothers went on high alpine tours; just
crossing a rather steep slope was agony for him. For this reason and much to his
regret he had to decline an invitation by Richard Archbold to accompany him, in
1932, on a trip to climb several mountains in the Alps, including the Matterhorn.
During his New Guinea expedition and in the Solomon Islands Mayr had his
share of tropical diseases like bacterial dysentery, several malaria attacks (eventually
knocked out with the help of Plasmochin, a new experimental drug), and
dengue fever aggravated by a botched tooth extraction that had resulted in a jaw
abscess. On that occasion he felt most miserable with high fever and much pain on
the hot expedition boat. When in Java, he picked up smoking (letter to Stresemann
dated 23 February 1928) and smoked cigarettes rather heavily for the next 10 years,
but in 1939 broke this habit voluntarily (letter 31 July 1947). He was twice operated.
First, shortly after his return from New Guinea in 1930, when his appendix
got inflammated (the wound got infected and did not heal for 5 or 6 weeks) and,
second, on 13 April 1934 when his left kidney had to be removed. The tumor was