He suffered from many symptoms, some being related to meniere’s disease, however the correct condition is still unclear to me.
So any answers regarding Darwin’s bad health?
bump.
Bad genes?
From here,
So, I think the short answer to your question is “No answers, only speculation.”
This board wisely discourages people trying to diagnose an existing medical condition for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is not having all the information available. It’s probably even dicier trying to diagnose one from over a century ago, given only the information available to the doctors at that time. And even today, sometimes people end up going thru a long battery of tests before they arrive at a diagnosis, especially in an uncommon ailment. Good luck in your quest to find additional info, but the best you’ll get is a SWAG (scientific WAG, which is marginally better than the run of the mill WAG).
God hated him.
Survival of not the fittest, I guess.
I was pretty surprised when I found there was an entire page on wikipedia, just on the subject of his health:
People have been debating this topic in diverse ways for a long time. Again, I had no idea.
I’ll throw in my in my 2/100 of a US$ for mix of hypochondria, mild illness and the cures he underwent. He was medically trained, but couldn’t stand the sight of blood. So he has all those facts in his head, that’s a recipe for hypochondria aka Medical Student’s disease. Note, he never missed work for his illness – whether it’s geology in the Andes or an important scientific meeting, even though just before such evens, he’s often bed ridden. He was scientific enough to reject homeopathy, but too polite it seems to refuse the hydrotherapy cures.
Seems like he wanted to be well on one hand, and fought against himself and other obligations with the other. As I’d heard his biography, he was worried how he couldn’t be a doctor, and didn’t feel like becoming a member of the clergy, so what was he going to do with his life? And his brother told him, “We’re wealthy enough so you don’t have to do anything to support yourself” So he became a naturalist, and did just as much work as he could get away with.
Why wasn’t I born in this era. And, you know, to British, landed, nobility as well.
That Wikipedia page seems pretty thorough.
Worth noting that neither of the two major late-20th-century biographies pretended to know. Desmond and Moore did argue that it was mainly anxiety-driven, as part and parcel of there wider portrait of him crippled with fear about reactions to his ideas. Browne explicitly suggests it was some combination of things, real and imagined, but avoids specific diagnoses. She does however reject Chagas’ disease, one of the more popular suggestions in recent decades, on the grounds that the symptoms and circumstances of his one outbreak of illness in South America don’t fit.
I remember a anecdote by Isaac Asimov where he said that a lady said to him, “Wouldn’t it be wonderful to live back when servants were cheap.”, He replied, “No, it would be horrible!”. “Why?”, she said. “Because, I’d be one of the servants.”, he said.
No, that was Mendel. Darwin’s parasites just kept evolving.