Darwin's Illness

10. Illness and “Anxious Looking Forward”

10 Illness and “Anxious Looking Forward” Weeks after returning to Down, as Darwin worked on a new edition of Origin and felt obligated to answer a “Multitude of Letters”1 from old and new correspondents about the book, his flatulence accentuated. He complained to friends of being “not worth an old button,” of “having gone back . . . to my bad way,” and of having “incessant discomfort, I may say misery.” The increase of illness caused him to change his positive opinions about Ilkley and tell Hooker that “Ilkley seems to have done me no essential good.” Four days later he reverted to his previous opinion and wrote Fox that at Ilkley: “I was hardly able from lameness, Boils &c to give Water-cure a fair trial this time, but I think we shall go there again next early summer.”2 In January 1860, he began consulting about his stomach with a new London physician, Frederick William Headland.3 Dr. Headland probably diagnosed him as suffering from oxaluria, in which there was an abnormal formation of oxalic acid in the blood and excess of urea in the urine, and treated him with nitro-hydrochloric acid and a diet restricting sweets and wine.4 In March, he first reported to Fox that this regimen “has done nothing for me as yet & I shall go to my grave, I suppose, grumbling & groaning with daily, almost hourly, discomfort.” However, in May he wrote his old friend that his health had been “better of late,” and he was “inclined to attribute” this improvement to Dr. Headland’s regimen. He then makes no further mention of following a sugarfree diet.5 This was a second recorded attempt at treating his illness by limiting sweets. He also suffered briefly from a new symptom. On 2 March, he told the American botanist Asa Gray: “I have had a very short but sharpish touch of illness,—a slight touch of pleurisy, & am weak.” The next day, he told Hooker: “I had an attack of fever (with a touch of pleurisy) which came on like a Lion, but went off as a lamb, but has shattered me a good bit.”6 Illness and “Anxious Looking Forward” / 77 Early in April, he read an anonymously authored review of Origin in the Edinburgh Review that he recognized as being written by Richard Owen, and he described it to Lyell as “extremely malignant, clever & I fear . . . very damaging .” He confided to Lyell that it was “painful to be hated in the intense degree with which Owen hates me,” but that after feeling “uncomfortable for one night” he “got quite over it.”7 When Hooker and Huxley (whom Owen had also attacked) told him it was his “duty” to publicly reply to Owen, he refused.8 Fearing that the effort of making such a reply would upset his stomach, he told Hooker that “to answer and think more on the subject is too unpleasant.”9 He continued to share with his friends the pain Owen was causing him, while Hooker and Huxley shared with him the antipathies they felt for Owen. He was pleasantly distracted from thoughts of Owen when from 25 April to 1 May he was visited at Down by Mary Butler.10 Early in June, he equivocated about whether he would attend the annual summer meetings of the British Association for the Advancement of Science at Oxford,11 where there were to be confrontations between supporters and critics of Origin, including Hooker, Huxley, Owen, and the Anglican bishop of Oxford , Samuel Wilberforce. On 26 June, the day the Association meetings began, Darwin wrote to Hooker: “My stomach has utterly failed; & I cannot think of Oxford.”12 The utter failure of this stomach resulted not only from aversion to attending a public controversy over his book but also from anxiety over eight weeks of persistent fever in his daughter Etty.13 From 28 June to 7 July, he went for hydropathy to Dr. Lane’s new establishment, which had moved from Moor Park to Sudbrook Park, Richmond Surrey.14 From there, upon receiving a letter from Hooker reporting how he and Huxley had successfully defended Origin against attacks by Bishop Wilberforce , before a crowd of almost a thousand,15 he wrote Hooker: I have been very poorly with almost continuous bad headache for 48 hours, & I was low enough & thinking what a useless burthen I was to myself & all others, when your letter came & it has so cheered me. Your kindness & affection brought tears into my eyes. Talk of fame, honour, pleasure, wealth...