Andy Warhol Was a Hoarder (28 page)

To set him on a straight course, Dr. Darwin sent 16-year-old Charles to Edinburgh in 1825 to join his older brother, Erasmus, at medical school. It was something of a family tradition; both Dr. Darwin and his own father had studied to become physicians. The Darwin brothers enjoyed each other's company, attending lectures together and wandering to nearby fishing villages. But Charles couldn't bear the smells and spectacle of dissection or the eerie quality of the cadavers, some of which had been robbed out of graves and sold illegally to the school for profit. He was haunted, too, by the pain inflicted on patients during surgery (general anesthesia had yet to be discovered) and by the sight of blood, a phobia he claimed to have shared with his father. Although he dutifully showed up to observe two operations, he fled in horror before either one was completed and never went back. “To the end of his life he feared the sight of [blood], becoming almost hysterical if one of his own children accidentally grazed his or her skin, and quite unable to locate or apply a ‘plaister' in his panic,” according to Janet Browne. “Though the children laughed at him, it was a very real revulsion.” Darwin, who lasted only two sessions at Edinburgh, never completed his medical studies.

With medicine no longer an option, Dr. Darwin proposed an alternative career for his son: clergyman. The path would start with an undergraduate university degree at Cambridge, followed by the steps required to receive ordination from the Church of England. It should come as no surprise that Darwin found his course of study at Cambridge less than inspired; he hated algebra, “did nothing” in the classics except attend a few required classes, and summed up his time there as “sadly wasted.” Two experiences, however, had a lasting impact. First, Darwin became
infatuated with collecting beetles, which helped lay the groundwork for his later work as a naturalist. (He was so enthusiastic that one day he popped a beetle into his mouth so that he wouldn't lose it; the insect, less thrilled about this arrangement than Darwin, expelled a noxious fluid, burning the scientist's tongue.) The second critical development was Darwin's friendship with John Stevens Henslow, a brilliant young professor of botany. The two became intellectual confidants, taking long walks together and discussing scientific developments of the day. Their friendship, Darwin later reflected, was “a circumstance which influenced my whole career more than any other.”

It was Henslow, after all, who sent Darwin a letter in August 1831 asking him if he'd like to embark on a scientific journey on a ship called the
Beagle
. The vessel's captain, Robert FitzRoy, had been commissioned by the British Admiralty to take the
Beagle
on a second voyage (the first had taken place between 1825 and 1830) to continue a survey of the South American waterways. FitzRoy, who was aboard the first time, was looking for a scientific associate to keep him company and to engage in exploration. At first, Darwin's father, who would have to finance his son's expenses, vehemently objected. Worried, among other things, that Charles would never commit to a profession, he called the plan a “useless undertaking” and a “wild scheme.” But Darwin had an ally in his uncle, Josiah Wedgwood, and he successfully sought Uncle Jos's help in changing his father's mind. “The undertaking would be useless as regards his profession,” Wedgwood wrote to Darwin's father, “but looking upon him as a man of enlarged curiosity, it affords him such an opportunity of seeing men and things as happens to few.”

On December 27, 1831, 22-year-old Charles Darwin set sail on a journey that would alter the trajectory of his life and transform the history of science. The trip would also serve as a signpost for
Darwin's health. Just before departing, Darwin exhibited signs of intense anxiety, and several months after returning, he began suffering from the symptoms that would debilitate him for decades, including what may have been panic attacks.

T
HERE IS OVERWHELMING EVIDENCE
that Darwin was sick, often severely so, for much of the latter half of his life. He referred to his ill health repeatedly in his correspondence and painstakingly recorded his symptoms in a health diary whose entries included specific complaints (“boil under arm,” “slight fit of flatulence”) as well as overall ratings (“goodish” and “poorish” to “well very” and “well barely.”) Darwin's extensive list of woes featured fatigue, dizziness, eczema, boils, muscle weakness, cold fingers and toes, black spots, and even hysterical crying. But his overwhelming complaint was abdominal distress, with ongoing bouts of nausea, vomiting, and flatulence. Over the years, Darwin's symptoms have spurred researchers to propose an alphabet soup of diagnoses: agoraphobia, anxiety, appendicitis, arsenic poisoning, barnacle preservative allergy, brucellosis (bacterial infection), Chagas' disease (infection resulting from a tropical bug bite), Crohn's disease, cyclical vomiting syndrome, depression, gastritis, gout, hepatitis, hypochondria, irritable bowel syndrome, lactose intolerance, malaria, Ménière's disease (inner ear disorder), mitochondrial disease (genetic disorder inherited from maternal lineage), neurasthenia (nervous disorder), obsessive-compulsive disorder, panic disorder, paroxysmal tachycardia (rapid heartbeat), peptic ulcer, pigeon allergy, pyroluria (blood disorder), and social anxiety. The only thing anyone can say with any certainty about Darwin and illness is that he died, at the age of 73, of heart disease.

What makes Darwin's case so intriguing is that it exemplifies the powerful interplay between body and mind—the reality that fatigue and vomiting can signify an intestinal infection in one case and emotional upheaval in another. Or both at the very same time. Even without a confirmed diagnosis, though, it is clear that Darwin struggled with a sensitive disposition. This became readily apparent as the scientist waited to board the
Beagle
. The 90-foot vessel had been scheduled to set sail from England's port town of Plymouth in October of 1831, but was delayed by bureaucratic impediments and heavy gales until the end of December. The intervening months were “the most miserable which I ever spent,” Darwin later wrote, as he struggled with ailments. His symptoms during this time included chest pains, palpitations, abdominal discomfort, and fear of dying, according to Dr. Ralph Colp, Jr., a Columbia psychiatrist who spent decades poring over Darwin's letters, journals, and manuscripts. Darwin felt “giddy & uncomfortable” in the head and he was eager to escape the predeparture bustle of preparations. “I look forward even to sea sickness with something like satisfaction,” he wrote in a letter to Henslow as the ship prepared to depart, “anything must be better than this state of anxiety.”

People with anxiety often worry excessively about what
might
happen and anticipate the worst—“everyone's going to laugh at my speech,” “my headache must be a brain tumor.” As much as Darwin was eager to take the journey, he was nervous about what he might encounter along the way, according to Colp: the close quarters on the ship, the coarse behavior of the crew, the possibility that he might become ill or even drown. He also felt uneasy about being away for such an extended period: “I was out of spirits at the thought of leaving all my family and friends for so long a time, and the weather seemed to me inexpressibly gloomy,” he later reflected.
And he began to exhibit a fear about his symptoms—hypochondria is rooted in anxiety—as well as an obsession about his health that would reappear throughout his life. “I was also troubled with palpitations and pain about the heart,” Darwin wrote, “and like many a young ignorant man, especially one with a smattering of medical knowledge, was convinced that I had heart disease.”

The journey, which spanned 40,000 miles from England to South America, Australia, and Africa, had plenty of challenges, both practical and social. In letters home, Darwin documented the rough seas and navigational mishaps. He struggled with occasional bouts of fever, intestinal distress, a swollen knee, occasional boils and headaches, and, more than anything, severe seasickness. Darwin spent much of his time at sea nibbling on raisins (his father's prescription), lying in his hammock, and retching. Although he and FitzRoy fared well together overall and engaged in deep and spirited discussions, Darwin remembered the captain (who would commit suicide years later) as exceedingly temperamental, suspicious, and morose. Darwin missed evening chats with his friends and fretted about what would become of his endeavors after the trip. “It is disheartening work to labour with zeal & not even know whether I am going the right road,” he wrote to his cousin in October 1833.

The young adventurer was mostly in good physical form, however, while exploring on land, which composed the bulk of the journey. He rode hundreds of miles on horseback, sometimes through hail and snow; he slept outside; he climbed into the Andean foothills; he hunted animals for Christmas dinner; he ate roasted armadillo; he survived an earthquake and a near-capsizing of the boat by a glacier; he even “saved his crewmates by rescuing a rowboat from a tidal wave” in Tierra del Fuego, according to his biographer Janet Browne. Along the way, Darwin collected some
10,000 specimens—plants, fossils, rocks, animals—and shipped them home for analysis. In the end, Darwin “proved the fittest and, in many respects, the toughest man on board,” the British physician Sir George Pickering noted in his book,
Creative Malady
. No mention was made of the illness that would later dominate his life, Pickering writes: “He was too active and too busy acquiring new experiences.”

The
Beagle
journey, scheduled to last two years, stretched to five. When Darwin returned to England in October 1836, he was a changed man. His father, upon seeing him for the first time after the voyage, turned to Darwin's sisters and said, “Why, the shape of his head is quite altered”—a comment Darwin took as symbolic confirmation that his mind had developed through the course of his
Beagle
pursuits. No longer foraging for a career, Darwin was now a world-traveled naturalist who had assembled evidence—even if he didn't realize it at the time—for his theory of evolution.

Darwin's health would also undergo a dramatic metamorphosis. Stress of any kind is a common trigger for anxiety, and by the fall of 1837, when he was 28 years old and living in London, Darwin had taken on a weighty workload. His many activities included serving on the governing council of London's Geological Society, finishing a detailed account of the
Beagle
voyage, and scribbling out his earliest musings about evolution in a series of notebooks about the “transmutation of species.” He also began to struggle with poor health. “I have not been very well of late with an uncomfortable palpitation of the heart,” he wrote in a letter to Henslow that year, “and my doctors urge me
strongly
to knock off all work & go and live in the country, for a few weeks.”

Worriers fear the unknown and tend to have difficulty making decisions. Around this time, Darwin was also wrestling with a major question in his personal life: whether or not to marry.
A thoughtful and exacting man, he scribbled out the pros and cons under “Marry” and “Not Marry” columns on scraps of paper. The upsides, Darwin noted, included companionship and “the charms of music and female chit-chat.” The advantages to remaining single: no forced visits to relatives, relief from the “anxiety and responsibility” of children, and freedom to do as he liked. “Eheu!! I never should know French—or see the Continent—or go to America, or go up in a Balloon,” he lamented about marriage, while at the same time bucking himself up to move forward. “Never mind my boy—Cheer up—One cannot live this solitary life, with groggy old age, friendless and cold and childless staring one in one's face, already beginning to wrinkle.” By the time Darwin finally decided to propose to his cousin Emma Wedgwood, he was taxed by his reservations, not to mention the pressure of his work. His proposal was less than a boisterous occasion. “Darwin was exhausted by the nervous strain,” wrote Janet Browne, “with a bad headache.”

The couple would go on to enjoy a solid and loving 43-year marriage, and Emma became Darwin's dedicated caregiver throughout his many bouts of ill health. But his wife could not heal Darwin—far from it. During their early years of marriage, the scientist recorded a slew of debilitating symptoms, including chills, trembling, weakness, severe flatulence, vomiting, and headaches. His poor health fluctuated with his work and with Emma's first two pregnancies. Darwin's aversion to pain and bleeding may have made him especially sensitive to the discomfort his wife was going through, according to Colp. The period before delivery, Darwin wrote in a letter to his cousin William Fox, “knocked me up, almost as much as it did Emma herself.” Darwin also worried excessively about the well-being of his children, fearing not only that they had inherited a weak constitution but that they might be affected by the effects of inbreeding, which increases the risk of
birth defects and illness. “My dread is hereditary ill-health,” Darwin wrote to Fox in 1852, when his ninth child was almost a year old. “Even death is better for them.”