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Dogged by Bad Health and Bad Reviews, Darwin Needed Friends Like These
In a new book, the medical historian Howard Markel homes in on Darwin’s physical and emotional travails — and the colleagues who rallied to his cause.
Sam Kean is the author of six books on science history, including “The Icepick Surgeon” and “The Disappearing Spoon.”
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ORIGIN STORY: The Trials of Charles Darwin, by Howard Markel
Charles Darwin was not a well man. He spent most of his adult life as a recluse, suffering from a whole host of symptoms: boils, rashes, ulcers, headaches, and bouts of vomiting and gas so painful that they often prostrated him. Modern doctors have retroactively diagnosed him with more than a dozen different ailments — lupus, narcolepsy, gout, pigeon allergies, etc. — without reaching any consensus. But one thing is clear: Darwin’s ups and downs correlated strongly with the stresses and joys of his scientific work, especially “On the Origin of Species,” which at different times proved both a soothing panacea and a veritable poison.
In “Origin Story: The Trials of Charles Darwin,” Howard Markel, a medical historian (he favors a diagnosis of lactose intolerance as Darwin’s primary ailment), details how the scientist came to write his magnum opus, as well as the many trying days he endured on its behalf.
Markel’s first section recounts the familiar story of how Darwin nearly got scooped. He opened his mail one day in 1858 to find a draft of a paper from the naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace. To Darwin’s horror, the paper duplicated his own, then-unpublished theory of natural selection. Rather than risk losing credit, Darwin slyly dispatched two friends to approach a journal and pressure it to solicit a paper from him to run alongside Wallace’s. The two friends also insisted that Darwin’s name — and his many professional honorifics — appear first in all publicity for the pieces. Generously, Wallace never raised a fuss over these machinations, but here we see Darwin the operator, shrewdly working levers of power.
Later, though, Darwin got worked over himself. The most entertaining section of Markel’s book dives into the composition of “On the Origin of Species” and the toll it took on Darwin. He secured a publishing deal in just four days, but even those mild negotiations clobbered his health. He then had to rally and finish the thing, penning each page on a long board propped in his lap, with sheets of foolscap clipped to it. He nearly lost one chapter when a colleague’s children scribbled all over it. Darwin nevertheless churned out 513 pages in 13 months, then more or less keeled over and spent nine weeks in a hospital.
His publisher toyed with changing the book’s title (he preferred “The Origin: Natural Selection”), and one peer reviewer suggested that Darwin drop all the evolution stuff and expand the chapter on raising pigeons. (“Everybody is interested in pigeons,” the reviewer explained.) Darwin demurred.
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