In one particularly revealing letter to Chapman, Darwin gave a harrowing list of his symptoms:
“For 25 years extreme spasmodic daily & nightly flatulence: occasional vomiting, on two occasions prolonged during months. Vomiting preceded by shivering, hysterical crying[,] dying sensations or half-faint. & copious very pallid urine. Now vomiting & every passage of flatulence preceded by ringing of ears, treading on air & vision. … Nervousness when E [Emma, his wife] leaves me.”
Darwin’s illnesses stumped physicians then and they continue to perplex doctors now. Collectively, medical professionals have created a long list of diagnoses that includes “smouldering hepatitis,” malaria, duodenal ulcer, peptic ulcer, gout, “suppressed gout,” Chagas’ disease (a parasitic infection possibly contracted from a bug bite in Argentina), Crohn’s disease, arsenic poisoning, lupus, lactose intolerance, and an allergy to the pigeons he used in his research.
Stossel points out that although Darwin’s stomach issues were clearly debilitating, there may have been some benefit to his accompanying anxiety, citing research that shows that anxious people with high IQs tend to be better workers.
“From the high-strung can also come, at least some of the time, great science,” writes Stossel. “Dean Simonton, a psychologist at the University of California Davis, who has spent decades studying the psychology of genius, estimates that a third of all eminent scientists suffer from anxiety or depression or both. He surmises that the same cognitive or neurobiological mechanisms that predispose certain people to developing anxiety disorders also enhance the sort of creative thinking that produces conceptual breakthroughs in science.”
