Darwin's Illness

Preface

Preface In 1977 I published my first book, To Be an Invalid: The Illness of Charles Darwin .Init,basedlargelyonDarwin’sextantcorrespondence,Igavethehistoryof an illness that Darwin once described as “my old enemy.”1 At the time Darwin made this comment, he had experienced twenty-three years of daily discomfort that sometimes increased in intensity and duration and was frequently associated with other kinds of symptoms. I evaluated a number of theories about the possible causes of the illness. In the three decades that have followed the appearance of my book, knowledge of Darwin’s correspondence has greatly increased. There has been the publication of a calendar of all his published and unpublished letters (first printed in 1985 and then updated in 1994) and the publication of fifteen volumes of his correspondence, 1821–67. I have also learned new facts about Darwin’s personal life from his notebooks, his wife’s diary, the recollections of his children and friends, and comprehensive biographies by Adrian Desmond and James Moore, Darwin (1991), and Janet Browne, Charles Darwin: Voyaging (1995) and Charles Darwin: The Power of Place (2002). This increased knowledge showed me that many changes needed to be made in my book. These changes will be published by 2009, the bicentennial of Darwin ’s birth on 12 February and the 150th anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species on 26 November. This is the date of publication given in Morse Peckham’s recently reissued variorum edition of Origin. In the course of making these changes, although limitations of space have not made it possible to reprint my transcription of the Darwin family receipts and memoranda book, I have produced this new book, which is more informative than To Be an Invalid. Some of the additions I have made consist of new facets and insights on Darwin’s pre-Beagle health, on the possibility he may have contracted Chagas’ disease in South America, and on the occasional illnesses he had soon after he returned to England from the Beagle. I then discuss the onset of his lifelong adult illness and the possibility that Chagas’ disease may have been one of the causes of this illness. New information has enabled me to delineate several episodes of Darwin’s illness that were hitherto unrecorded, to offer new explanations for some of his large and small increases of illness, to narrate a fuller and more detailed history of his symptoms and treatments, and to give a more intimate portrait of him as a scientist and man by depicting the manifold and complex ways that illness influenced his work and his relationships with family and friends. As theories about the possible causes of the illness have continued to proliferate , I have evaluated each of these, showing how they were often stimulated not only by new information about Darwin but also by new expansions in medical and psychiatric knowledge. In an appendix to Darwin’s Illness I have added a complete transcription of Darwin’s 1849–55 “diary of health,” which I had previously only partly quoted. I believe that the diary is a remarkable personal and medical document, because it is the only time that Darwin gives a chronicle of his various daily symptoms over a period of several years, shows the different treatments he used, and shows many of the possible reasons for increases in severity of his symptoms. As far as I can judge, this book may contain practically everything that is known about Darwin’s illness. xiv / Preface ...