In early 1838, he had read a book on breeding domestic animals and noted without further comment that it contained some “excellent observations of sickly offspring being cut off—so that not propagated by nature.” In 1839, he wrote that “the numbers of fatal diseases in mankind” were no doubt due to the “rearing up of every hereditary tendency towards fatal diseases, and such constitutions only being cleared off by fatal diseases.” So the incidence of severe illness among humans was an exceptional pattern in the natural world, a cruel side effect of our care for each other and our protection of the weak and infirm from the struggle for existence.
Charles’s comment to his cousin Fox in March 1851 that he feared “with grief” that Annie had inherited his “wretched digestion” revealed that he was already then dwelling on the possibility that he was himself in a way responsible for her condition. A year after Annie’s death, he wrote to Fox about his surviving children that “My dread is hereditary ill-health.” Six months later he wrote again about his obsessive private worries. “The worst of my bugbears is hereditary weakness.” Two years further on, in 1854, he revealed his worries indirectly to Hooker in a letter urging him to attend carefully to his troubling stomach condition. “Do reflect and act resolutely. Remember your troubled heart-action formerly plainly told how your constitution was tried. But I will say no more, excepting that a man is mad to risk health, on which everything, including his children’s inherited health, depends.” The comment reflects a significant point in Charles’s view of evolution, that while arguing that natural selection of random variations was the main mechanism for adaptation, he also followed the French evolutionist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck in believing that some characteristics acquired during a human or animal’s life could somehow be inherited. As he dwelt on this idea, Charles was caught in a web of guilt. In facing Annie’s death, he had chosen to disregard the religious idea that it might be a punishment for his sin, but an element in his scientific thinking suggested instead that he was responsible for causing her death by a natural process.
Powerless as they were to provide any effective medical treatment for the most fatal illnesses, some Victorian doctors tried to identify any possible causes in the victims’ conditions of life, so that any factors to do with the water supply, say, or poisons at the workplace could be dealt with. Sir James Clark wrote in his Treatise: “It is only by convincing the public of the comparative futility of all attempts to cure consumption . . . that physicians can ever hope to produce those beneficial results in improving public health and in preserving and prolonging human life, which it is the distinguishing privilege of their profession to aim at.”
When Clark was preparing his work for publication, he was helped by a young medical writer called William Farr. He was the son of a farm labourer in Shropshire and had been working as a dresser in Shrewsbury Infirmary in the 1820s when Charles’s father was one of the leading physicians in the town and Charles was studying medicine at Edinburgh. While Farr worked for Clark and was helping him set out the argument that consumption was fatal, his own young wife became ill with the disease and died. Farr had a strong interest in medical statistics and decided to take up Clark’s challenge to prevent fatal illnesses by identifying factors in the patterns of death and improving public health. He was appointed Compiler of Abstracts for the Registrar-General of Births, Deaths and Marriages, and produced his Abstracts of Causes of Death in England and Wales each year for the rest of his working life. The Abstracts and his accompanying reports are the foundations of the modern sciences of medical statistics and epidemiology, and stand among the great achievements of the age.
Farr wrote in his first report: “Diseases are more easily prevented than cured, and the first step to their prevention is the discovery of their exciting causes . . . The registration of the causes of death . . . will give greater precision to the principles of physic. Medicine, like the other natural sciences, is beginning to abandon vague conjecture where facts can be . . . determined by observation; and to substitute numerical expressions for uncertain assertions.” Commenting many years later on population growth as a factor in natural selection, he wrote: “The great source of the misery of mankind is not their numbers, but their imperfections, and the want of control over the conditions in which they live. Without embarrassing ourselves with the difficulties the vast theories of life present, there is a definite task before us—to determine from observation, the sources of health, and the direct causes of death in the two sexes at different ages and under different conditions. The exact determination of evils is the first step towards their remedies.”
Farr’s reports were known as his “ledgers of death,” and every year he offered tables of figures showing the patterns of mortality from all causes in each five-year age band. In 1851, five children died in every thousand between the ages of ten and fourteen. Comparable figures have been produced ever since, and in 1996 one child died in five thousand between the same ages. Charles and Emma were therefore over twenty-five times more likely to lose a child of Annie’s age than a family is now.
Dickens gave statistical analysis of this kind a bad name in Hard Times. His criticism of Mr. Gradgrind, his love of hard fact and his “tabular statements” did not apply to those like Farr who compiled their tables in the hope that they could be used for vital and humane purposes.
Farr made a detailed analysis of certified causes of death. For 1851, he reported that there were 395,396 deaths in all, of which 64,708, or one in six, were from tubercular diseases. Next came pneumonia with 21,983 deaths—only a third as many. Pulmonary consumption alone was fatal to almost three in every thousand of the population, a quite exceptional figure for a single disease in the whole country.
Charles studied Farr’s reports and kept notes on the figures for child mortality. In the 1870s, he wrote to him about another issue connected in his mind with Annie’s death. Some people at the time believed that the children of marriages between first cousins, as Charles and Emma were, were doomed to deformity and illness which might include consumption. One doctor with extreme views claimed that they might be dwarfish or ill-formed; they might be “cut off by consumption” or “become inmates of a lunatic asylum.” In short, consumption “in its most hideous forms, revels in the system of the unhappy child of two persons of one blood. Nature seems to abhor this incestuous compact, and visits on the children the sins of the parents.” Another doctor with humane and moderate views wrote that consumption was “for the most part . . . the parent’s gift” and marriage of “persons who are too nearly allied in blood” was often the cause. Charles’s own findings on the fundamental role of sexual reproduction, variation and outbreeding in the formation of species had prompted him to look at the effects of inbreeding on the partners’ offspring, and led him to fear that first-cousin marriages might indeed be harmful. He asked Farr if the matter could be covered in the National Census for 1871. Farr was eager to help and a question was drafted for the census form. It was put forward for parliamentary approval, but rejected as an unwarranted breach of family privacy on a sensitive matter. Charles was left to protest in the conclusion to The Descent of Man that “ignorant members of our legislature” had blocked an important inquiry into a matter of great concern for the avoidance of human suffering.
The eventual key to the full understanding of tuberculosis was the discovery by Dr. Koch in the 1880s that the agent was a living organism. It now appears that the disease spread in the nineteenth century, declined in the first part of the twentieth century and is now spreading again, because of changes in the germ’s conditions of life in the organisms it infects, and because it is evolving by natural selection to survive those changes. There is now a “natural history of infectious disease” which looks at the relations between parasitic micro-organisms and their hosts in an evolutionary framework. Ironically but with characteristic insight, while Charles had no conception of micro-organisms as carriers of disease, he clearly identified the special features of co-adaptation
between parasites and hosts. He noted in The Origin of Species how mistletoe as a parasite was “dependent on other organic beings.” Writing about epidemics working as a limiting check on populations “independent” of natural selection, he pointed out that some were due to parasitic worms “and here comes in a sort of struggle between the parasite and its prey.” However, despite this recognition of the struggle, he found himself acknowledging “beautiful co-adaptations . . . in the humblest parasite which clings to the hair of a quadruped or the feathers of a bird . . . We see beautiful adaptations everywhere and in every part of the organic world.” But the adaptations by one of the humblest parasites were lethal for its human hosts.
Many years later, in 1877 as the germ theory of infection was being developed, Charles’s friend Professor Ferdinand Cohn, a leading plant physiologist at the University of Breslau in Silesia, sent him a copy of his periodical Beiträge zur Biologie der Pflanzen. The issue contained the first photographs ever published of bacteria; they had been taken by Dr. Koch, who was to identify the tuberculosis bacillus five years later. Dr. Koch had come to Professor Cohn with his first microscopic preparations of the bacilli that were responsible for anthrax, and had offered him a paper arguing for the first time that the bacilli were the cause of the disease. Professor Cohn recognised at once the great importance of his findings for medicine and the preservation of human life, and wrote to Charles that the photographs showed “the least but also perhaps the mightiest living beings.” Charles replied: “I well remember saying to myself between twenty and thirty years ago, that if ever the origin of any infectious disease could be proved, it would be the greatest triumph to Science; and now I rejoice to have seen the triumph.” It was twenty-six years since Annie had died. Bacteria were indeed the least but mightiest beings, living and killing unseen.
CHAPTER TWELVE
THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES
Etty’s distress—Time and memory—Struggle for life—
Last child—The Origin of Species
IN THE WEEKS AFTER ANNIE’S DEATH in April 1851, Emma prepared for the birth of her next child. During the hours when Charles was writing his memorial of Annie, Emma had some hopes her “troubles were beginning,” but it was a false alarm. The next day, she wrote to Fanny and Hensleigh: “It will be a very soothing occupation looking after a young baby.” She gave birth to Horace a fortnight later, but had difficulties with him. A few days after, Elizabeth, who was still looking after her, wrote a disappointing account to Aunt Fanny Allen. Her letter does not survive, but Aunt Fanny replied that she had looked forward “with so much hope to this time for the healing influence to her sorrow. However we must have patience and wait.” A wet-nurse came for Horace and some “artificial nipples” were obtained. Emma stayed in her room, away from the life of the household, while she recovered slowly. She came downstairs in mid-June.
Charles tried to avoid the pain of his grief by concentrating on his species theory. “The only chance of forgetting for short times your dreadful loss,” he wrote to Francis many years later after Francis’s wife had died in childbirth, lay in “the habit of close mental attention.” A week after writing his memorial of Annie, he turned his mind to a problem which, like the design of the eye, posed a serious challenge to his argument about how species were formed. It “pressed so hardly” on the theory, he was to write eventually in The Origin of Species, that an effective answer had to be found. Sitting in his study, he wrote that it had often occurred to him that there ought to be “intermediate forms” between different kinds of creature. He took up the idea that the forms that would be found would not lie halfway between, but would be connected with both kinds by separate descent from a common ancestor. “I suggest not halfway between bird and reptile, but some third form equally connected with both.” That suggestion lies at the heart of the evolutionary understanding of taxonomic relations, and has been borne out by all subsequent discoveries. The fact that all fossil hominids and other primates, for example, can best be placed on different branches of a family tree is a support for the theory of common descent which is now taken for granted. But as Charles sketched it out that day in May 1851, the idea was also a distraction from his pain.
Etty had been severely shaken by Annie’s death. When she looked back on her childhood in her old age, she remembered how she felt that Annie was “the flower of the flock” with a gift for music, more beauty and much more charm than she had. “The maids told me, I well remember, how superior she was to me in all ways, but especially in sweetness of disposition.”
In July Charles and Emma took Etty and George to London for the Great Exhibition, which had been drawing huge crowds. They stayed with Charles’s brother Erasmus; Charles took an intense interest in the exhibits, and the family went for a second day. Aunt Fanny Allen felt that the children lost their interest after a short time. All the others whom she had seen there looked “wretched victims of ennui, and so it would be with these children, except for the sweet cakes and ices” that Uncle Ras bought for them “which I believe would please them better if they had them in the gardens here close at hand.” Etty did not think much of the exhibition; she stayed at Erasmus’s home on the second day and helped the housemaid scrub the back stairs “as being better fun.”
The next day, Charles and Emma took the children to the Zoological Gardens where Obaysch the hippopotamus was still the most popular attraction. Then they went to the Polytechnic Institution in Regent Street, an exhibition hall which rivalled the Adelaide Gallery where the children had sat for their daguerreotypes two years before. A children’s book of the time described a boy’s visit to the Polytechnic. He was weighed in the patent weighing machine; he saw the diving bell go down; he tried the electrical machine; he saw the glass-blower and brought away a glass ship; and, last of all, he saw “the magnified figures and the dissolving views.” Etty and George were taken up to Richard Beard’s daguerreotype studio on the roof and sat for their “sun pictures.” Taking Etty and George to be photographed, Charles must have been thinking of the daguerreotype of Annie which he was now “so thankful” to have. George, who was just six, was dressed in a small child’s tunic, with white cotton drawers, white socks and leather shoes. He sat cross-legged on the studio chair with a composed and determined look. Etty wore a dark dress for half-mourning; she looked straight at the camera as she had done two years before, but her mind was now elsewhere and her face showed her unhappiness.
When they returned to Down, Emma watched Etty with concern, and did what she could to help her. “Etty nearly 8 years old. She appeared for some time to have lost the distressing feelings she used to have on hearing music, but one evening I saw her countenance change when Miss Thorley was singing, and on taking her out of the room, she said, rather distressed, ‘But Mamma, where do the women go to, for all the angels are men?’ She burst into tears when I asked her if she had been thinking of Annie, but said she had not.” The angels Etty was thinking of may have been the “Shining Ones” in John Bunyan’s vision of the Holy City in Pilgrim’s Progress, which Emma read with the children. “Behold the City shone like the sun, the streets also were paved with gold, and in them walked many men with crowns on their heads, palms in their hands, and golden harps to sing praises withal.”
One afternoon later in the month, Etty came to Emma “looking very much distressed.” She asked: “Mamma, what can I do to be a good girl?” Emma told her several things, “openness and so on,” and said she had better pray to God to help her to be good. Etty asked: “Shall I pray to God now?” and Emma led her through a short prayer. At bedtime a few days later, Etty asked: “Will you help me to be good?” Emma replied that Annie was a good child and that she did not think Etty would find it difficult to be as good as she was. She asked Etty “what made her so unhappy when she thought of being good.” Etty replied: “I am afraid of going to hell.” Emma said she thought Annie was safe in Heaven. “Come to me and I will try to help you as much as I can.” Etty replied: “But you are always
with somebody.”
The following day at bedtime, Etty whispered to her mother, “Do you think I have done anything wrong today?” “No I don’t think you have.” Emma wrote: “We consulted a little over her prayers. I repeated ‘Suffer little children’ and so on. It did not seem to be Pilgrim’s Progress as I had suspected which had alarmed her.” Etty asked: “Do you think you shall come to Heaven with me?” “Yes, I hope so, and we shall have Annie.” Etty suggested: “And Georgy too I hope.” Emma wrote: “The next day she seemed trying to be good all day, and ended at night looking very sweet and happy, and I hope her fears are passed.”
Emma read to the children from a Unitarian book of Stories for Sunday Afternoons. In the story of Adam and Eve, God told them after the Fall that “they would often be weary and sick, and at last would die. But He did not take all his kindness from them, though they had done this wrong thing. He clothed them with skins to keep them warm; and showed them how to get their food in the country whither He sent them forth. And He always watched over them in mercy, as He does over us now.”
Some time later Emma found Etty crying “in great distress.” Etty said: “Mamma, I used to be a very naughty girl when Annie was alive. Do you think God will forgive me? I used to be very unkind to Annie.” The following February, Emma felt that Etty’s mind had “developed itself wonderfully in the last few months. She asked me to put some of Annie’s hair in her locket.” One night, Etty said: “Mamma, I think of Annie when I am in bed.” The next night, she added: “Mamma, when I see anything belonging to Annie, it makes me think of her. Sometimes I make believe (but I know it is not true) that she is not quite dead, but will come back again sometime . . . Mamma, I want you to put something in my prayers about not being proud, as well as not being selfish.”
Creation (Movie Tie-In) Page 27
