Darwin's Illness

1. “Violent Fatigues,” “Bad Lips,” and Unwell Hands

1 “Violent Fatigues,” Bad Lips, and Unwell Hands When Charles Darwin was between fifteen and twenty-two years old, he was omnivorous of life and eagerly participated in many activities with friends and relatives. He also suffered from three kinds of disturbances to his health. The first kind happened when he sometimes reacted to certain events, pleasant or unpleasant, by experiencing episodes which his physician father, Dr. Robert Darwin, and younger sister, Catherine, called “violent fatigues” and which he later called “mental fatigue or rather excitement.” Episodes consisted of trembling, chills, shivering, and a gastrointestinal disorder of an unspecified nature. These occurred in varying intensities, durations, and combinations, and they were followed by periods of fatigue, lasting for varying lengths of time, which Darwin referred to as being “knocked up.”1 His siblings worried about how these episodes might disturb him and predicted that exposures to certain unpleasant events would cause him to have particular symptoms. Early in 1825, when he was sixteen, his older brother, Erasmus, who was then a medical student, wrote him a letter about dissecting a human cadaver and, referring to his strong negative feelings about this kind of dissecting, commented: “I don’t fancy it wld. have suited you especially before breakfast.” The following year, after becoming a medical student at the University of Edinburgh and listening to Professor Alexander Monro’s lectures on human anatomy, Darwin was stimulated by feelings of revulsion (perhaps accompanied by unpleasant stomach sensations) to write to his family that Dr. Monro was “dirty in person & actions,” and “I dislike him & his Lectures so much that I cannot speak with decency about them.” He would recollect that the subject of anatomy “disgusted” him and that “it has proved one of the greatest evils in my life that I was not urged to practice dissection, for I should soon  / Chapter 1 have got over my disgust; and the practice would have been invaluable for all my future work.” In addition to Monro’s lectures, he “attended on two occasions the operating theatre in the hospital at Edinburgh, and saw two very bad operations, one on a child, but rushed away before they were completed. Nor did I ever attend again, for hardly any inducement would have been strong enough to make me do so; this being long before the blessed days of chloroform.”2 He was horrified by the strapped screaming patients, the violence and cruelty of the surgeons as they hacked and cut at body parts, and by the sight of blood pouring into buckets and on the floor. He became “haunted” by what he had seen and would speak about it many years later. He would continue to be horrified at instances where individuals inflicted pain on each other, and he would always have (in the words of his son George) “a morbid horror of the sight or even of the word blood.”3 Two events that stimulated his deep feelings were caused by dogs. When he was at Edinburgh, Catherine wrote him that his dog, Sparks, had been sent from the Darwin household to another household, and that the loss of Sparks would “be a shock to all your nerves, and will spoil a good many breakfasts.” Several years later, after Darwin had terminated medical studies at Edinburgh and become a pre-divinity student at Cambridge University, he and his Cambridge friend John Herbert attended an exhibition of “learned dogs.” Herbert recollected how in the middle of the exhibition, “one of the dogs failed in performing the trick his master told him to do—on the man reproving, the dog put on the most piteous expression, as if in fear of the whip. Darwin seeing it, asked me to leave with him, saying, ‘come along, I can’t stand this any longer; how those poor dogs must have been licked.’” Darwin’s reasons for suddenly leaving the exhibition were not only to avoid being knocked up by his painful perceptions of cruelties to dogs but to also avoid the possibility that these perceptions might then haunt him, as he had been haunted by the horrors of the Edinburgh operations. Throughout his life he would be sensitive to individuals maltreating dogs, horses, and other domestic animals.4 On two occasions, he had physical symptoms because of mental experiences that were unusually pleasant, the first when he was fifteen and successfully hunted birds, the second when he was twenty and developing “a strong taste for music.” “How well I remember,” he...