Darwin's Illness

25. Psychiatric Theories of Bowlby, and of Barloon and Noyes

25 Psychiatric Theories of Bowlby, and of Barloon and Noyes In studying Darwin’s illness, John Bowlby, Thomas Barloon and Russell Noyes drew on information about the illness given in To Be an Invalid, the volumes of Darwin’s Correspondence and the Calendar of the Correspondence, and advances in adult and child psychiatry. In his 1990 biography of Darwin, Bowlby contended that his subject suffered from the hyperventilation syndrome. This develops when hyperventilating in an anxious individual results in a fall in blood carbon dioxide, which then produces many of the symptoms that Darwin complained of. When hyperventilating becomes persistent, yet so slight as to be imperceptible to the individual, there occurs a blood condition, which Bowlby describes as follows: “The carbon dioxide in the blood comes to be maintained continuously at a level only just above that at which symptoms are produced. As a result, any situation, however commonplace, that increases arousal and lowers the level still further will produce symptoms. It is thus that situations that are seemingly trivial such as animated conversation that Darwin liked to engage in, or even a heavy sigh can bring them on.”1 Bowlby further contends that the silence of Darwin’s family about the death of his mother, when he was eight, “made him intensely sensitive to any illness or possible death in the family.”2 His failure to grieve for his mother may have resulted in his becoming depressed and vulnerable to having psychosomatic symptoms.3 Bowlby states that there is a “significantly increased incidence of depressive and related disorders in those who have lost their mother during childhood,” and to support this he cites the 1985 research led by the London medical sociologists George Brown and Tirril Harris.4 158 / Chapter 25 The above contentions about the hyperventilation syndrome and the impact on Darwin’s health of his mother’s death raise various difficulties. While Bowlby believes that the hyperventilation syndrome and panic disorder are the same disease,5 recent research has tended to indicate that patients with panic disorder appear no more likely to panic when they hyperventilate than any other group of people. It now seems likely that, although hyperventilation often occurs during panic attacks, it is a secondary phenomenon, driven by the same processes that started the attacks in general. Thus, while some of Darwin’s symptoms may have been caused by hyperventilation, the same symptoms may also have been caused by panic attacks (with or without hyperventilation).6 Bowlby’s assertion that Darwin’s inhibition of grief over the death of his mother made him sensitive to illness and death in his family partly explains the severity of his 1848–49 illness when he was unable to grieve over the death of his father.7 However, in the opinion of his recent biographer, Janet Browne, there is no evidence that in the years after his mother’s death there was “any discernable or long-lasting crisis in Darwin’s emotional life.”8 The origins of his violent fatigues and bad lips remain unexplained. While he was sometimes depressed, depression was not a significant psychological force in his childhood or in his youth up to the voyage of the Beagle.9 The main family event in Darwin’s life after the death of his mother was his education by his sister Caroline. Although Bowlby notes that Caroline’s methods were “well-intentioned” but produced “undesirable effects” on him,10 more could have been said about the details of these undesirable effects and how they included his feelings of being ugly. Darwin’s daughter Henrietta has the following recollection of her father: “Late in his school life he was very sensitive as to his appearance. As to his feet especially, which were large & with bunions. He used to think himself so painfully ugly that he walked through the back streets of Shrewsbury habitually. I have a dim fancy Aunt Caroline had told him he was ugly.”11 While Darwin felt inferior because of Caroline’s criticisms of him, he also became (as he later recollected) “dogged so as not to care what she might say.”12 Frank Sulloway has commented that doggedness toward Caroline was the beginning of Darwin’s “tenaciousness, which included a strong element of indifference to the opinions of others, [and which was] central to his success.”13 Being dogged also meant continuing to work despite illness, as well as exacerbating his illness by working too hard. Because Darwin was dogged for most of his...