charles_darwin

The Life of Charles Darwin
no won’t do.– Imagine living all one’s day solitarily in smoky
dirty London house.—Only picture to yourself a nice soft wife
on a sofa with good fire, & books & music perhaps—Compare
this vision with the dingy reality of Grt. Marlbro St. Marry–
Mary–Marry Q.E.D. 33
29
Darwin’s ordinariness was also manifested in his suffering from
a malady typical of many famous Victorians: unexplained sickness.
Like Thomas Carlyle, Herbert Spencer (1820–1903), who coined the
term ‘‘survival of the fittest,’’ and Florence Nightingale (1820–1910),
the prominent reformer of the nursing profession, Darwin was sick a
great deal. In his autobiography, phrases like ‘‘I lost time because of
illness’’ or ‘‘my health was not strong’’ appear regularly. The phrases
even appear at the beginning of some his books, including The
Origin of Species. 34
These bouts of sickness were not minor incidents. Violent vomiting
attacks lasted for hours. Wrenching stomach aches with fits of
flatulence made Darwin too embarrassed to leave his house. Incessant
coughing persisted through the night. Intense tiredness left him
unable to do anything else but lie down. Fevers could not be quelled.
These episodes necessitated drastic action and, following another
habit common among famous, sick Victorians, Darwin went to a
health spa. These visits were significant. For example, Darwin was
resting at a hydropathic institution near Ilkley, Yorkshire, when the
first edition of The Origin of Species was published. Also of significance,
and to Darwin’s greater regret, he was unable to attend his
father’s funeral in November 1848 because he was too unwell. Any
excessive ‘‘excitement,’’ as Darwin called it, was likely to make him
violently ill.
Darwin’s contemporaries, his biographers, and numerous commentators
have tried to explain why Darwin was ill so often after he
returned from the Beagle voyage. According to his son Francis, Darwin
once attributed his poor health after 1836 to a severe fever he
contracted in September 1834 while in Chile. 35 Some commentators
have suggested Darwin’s illnesses were caused by repressed guilt
about the ideas in The Origin of Species. His illnesses were partly psychosomatic,
as Darwin himself acknowledged, but unlikely to be
related solely to his feelings about his radical theory of evolution or
the reaction to it: he was in poor health in 1837 before he had begun
to formulate a theory to explain his various findings about the diversity
of species. Perhaps the bite of the Benchuca beetle (Triatoma
infestans), ‘‘the great black bug of the Pampas,’’ as Darwin referred
to it, caused his illnesses. 36 People with Chagas’ disease, the result