On 31 January 2010 Michael Sylvester wrote: >Having posed the question "was Darwin a hypochrondiac?" >Paul Brandon replied with a flat "NO", but provided no >references to back up his answer. However, a program >on NPR aired last week claimed that Darwin exaggerated >his symptoms which can viewed within the hypochrondiacal >paradigm. His illness may not have been imaginary, but >exaggerations and pre-occupations with one's health >status can be viewed as signs of hypochrondiasis. [...]
On the other hand, preoccupation with a debilitating illness in the sense of repeatedly seeking medical means of alleviating the symptoms may be perfectly natural if it seriously interferes with one's work. I believe such was the case with Darwin, especially in the light of an important recent diagnosis by the Australian physician John Hayman: "Charles Darwin’s Illness" http://www.butterfliesandwheels.org/2011/charles-darwin%E2%80%99s-illness/ This complements a recent article of mine that refutes the notion that severe bouts of the illness were precipitated by extreme anxiety related to the periods when Darwin was working on his evolutionary theory: http://www.butterfliesandwheels.org/2011/darwins-illness/ Adrian Desmond and James Moore claim such a connection in their 1991 biography *Darwin*. In contrast, in his biography *Charles Darwin: A New Life* (1990) John Bowlby wrote that (at the time of writing) "medical opinion strongly favours a psychosomatic origin": Having concluded that Darwin's ill health "was of psychological origin", he plumps for the view that "he developed a vulnerable personality as a result of a childhood shadowed by an invalid and dying mother and an unpredictable and often intimidating father, and his symptoms can be understood as responses to stressful events and situations, both family and professional, that he met with during later life." What is interesting is that both Desmond & Moore and Bowlby look for occasions that seemingly provide confirmations of their respective theses – and both find them! They ignore Karl Popper's celebrated dictum that if you look for confirmations of a theory you can almost always find them. What you *should* be doing is looking for refutations. In neither case do the authors of these books check out *all* the several episodes of severe bouts of illness that occurred over a period of some 30 plus years (ascertainable from Darwin's letters and diaries), then list concurrent events to see if there are the correlations they claim. Had they done so they would have found no such general correlations. Darwin's bouts of illness were precipitated by virtually any social activity outside of his home, family anxieties relating to his wife Emma and their children, and above all by the sheer hard work he had to put into his writing (much of which in the years following the voyage of the Beagle had nothing to do with evolutionary theory). As John Hayman writes in the above-cited article, almost any activity undertaken by Darwin once his chronic state of ill-health set in during the early 1840s sufficed to exacerbate the symptoms. Moral: It is not enough to seek confirmations of one's pet thesis. You should rather seek to find refutations, and claim (tentative) success only if you find none. Allen Esterson Former lecturer, Science Department Southwark College, London allenester...@compuserve.com http://www.esterson.org --- You are currently subscribed to tips as: arch...@jab.org. To unsubscribe click here: http://fsulist.frostburg.edu/u?id=13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df5d5&n=T&l=tips&o=10068 or send a blank email to leave-10068-13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df...@fsulist.frostburg.edu
