Ralph Colp’s Creative Identification with Charles Darwin

Scholars do not choose their subjects randomly, but rather because they have some meaning to them which will inspire their own hard work, creativity, and determination in pursuing their research to completion. Their identification with their subjects and passion for the task is what leads to great biography, psychobiography, and medical history, as in the case of Ralph Colp’s exemplary study of Darwin’s illness.

When instructing my students on how to review a book, I advise them that there are essential elements that should be examined. These are the subject itself, the author of the volume including her/his viewpoints, knowledge of the subject, depth of research, and transference feelings regarding it—and finally the reviewer’s own feelings toward the author and the subject. There is no secret of my feelings regarding Charles Darwin, Ralph Colp, natural history, and psychobiography; I have the deepest respect and affection for them all. Below I will use Darwin’s Illness (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2008, ISBN978-0-8130-3231-3, i-xv, 337 pages, $44.95) by Ralph Colp, Jr., as the basis for a discussion of the unique and invaluable relationship that sometimes develops between the author and his subject.

Ralph Colp devoted his scholarly life to the study of Darwin’s life and ailments, resulting in a series of articles and two books. To Be an Invalid: The Illness of Charles Darwin (1977) was a most valuable study which Dr. Colp labored to update, especially when he was able to incorporate the great naturalist’s “Diary of Health,” which is included as an appendix in his final book—a book he was able to touch

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and see blurrily during his last months in the nursing home. While dying of prostate cancer over a prolonged period of time, he did not have the consolation of reading because of the severity of his cataracts. Fortunately, his family read to him. Rather like his hero who in the last part of his life maintained consistent contact only with his wife, butler, and to a lesser extent with his children, Colp withdrew from the wider world and maintained contact only with his immediate family and those who visited him. In visiting him, it was my impression that he was stoically awaiting his death.

As a child, Ralph Colp was struck by portraits of Charles Darwin and Sigmund Freud, and devoted his considerable talents to knowing these two men. He read Freud, had a ten-year Freudian analysis with Freud’s medical doctor (Max Schur) who became a psychoanalyst, and practiced a psychoanalytically informed psychiatry after he decided that he preferred listening to people to cutting them open as a surgeon. Colp’s enormous empathy for Darwin and identification with this great naturalist was based upon his sense that they shared many traits: both were shy men who lost themselves in their passionate search for knowledge. Both had famous physician-fathers. Each suffered parental loss, Charles Darwin through the death of his mother before his ninth birthday and Ralph Colp through the divorce of his parents when he was a young boy. Both Ralph and Charles grew up in the shadow of overpowering, highly successful fathers to whom they felt unable to measure up, even though each tried his best. Charles Darwin studied to be a medical doctor at the University of Edinburgh, but since he ran out of the operating room during two operations, including a “very bad” one on a young boy, he soon dropped out of medical school and Ralph Colp became a surgeon, like his father, until he decided he had no special knack for it and would always be comparing himself unfavorably to his namesake. Charles could put aside his sense of inadequacy when losing

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himself in nature, while Ralph forgot his self-doubts while listening to his patients and probing the lives of the heroes of his youth such as Darwin, the surgeon Halsted, and the revolutionary Trotsky.

I have long thought the naturalist had a more caring father than the psychiatrist. My primary evidence for this is Darwin’s description of his father’s lifelong financial support of him—Darwin never had a paying profession and desire to bring pleasure to all he came in contact with, as opposed to the critical quality and emotional distance of the senior Colp.

Though Ralph Colp, Jr., like his subject, would be in awe of his father until the day the latter died, he was not as dependent on him as was the naturalist. Ralph, who lived with his mother, identified with her frustration with the ex-husband who had abandoned her for a younger woman. Dr. Robert Darwin was such an overwhelming force to his children that they said, “Tide’s in,” when he arrived home. Charles described his father as not only the physically biggest and smartest man he ever met, but also as someone who could read your mind. As a young boy he suffered “deep mortification” when his father once told him in frustration,

“You care for nothing but shooting, dogs, and rat catching, and you will be a disgrace to yourself and all your family” (Barlow, ed., Autobiography p. 27). The first signs of his heart palpitations occurred after he uncharacteristically did something his father at first didn’t want him to do prepare to sail around the world on the Beagle as a naturalist. This act of rebellion, to which Dr. Robert Darwin acquiesced, changed our understanding of nature. Similarly, the senior Ralph Colp was unhappy about his son’s change of medical specialty, especially since he held psychiatry in very low regard. In contrast, his son saw medicine as an intellectual pursuit and science, rather than as a business as his father did. Dr. Colp’s intense identification with Darwin led him to devote his scholarly life to studying him, to the point

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that he used his vacations to travel to England to read the naturalist’s unpublished papers, befriend the librarians in charge of them, personally pay for the translation of accounts of meeting Darwin in French, German, and Russian, and thank his family for living with him while “I lived with Charles Darwin.” A further indication of his identification with the naturalist was his choice of a picture of the naturalist in middle age on the flyleaf of his 1977 book when he himself was middle aged and of Darwin in old age when he was in the same stage of life at the time of publication of the current volume.

Darwin’s Illness is divided into 31 chapters followed by the appendix—“Darwin’s Diary of Health” (70 pages), notes, bibliography, and the index. Deciphering Darwin’s terrible handwriting and personalized abbreviations in the health diary he kept between the years 1849-1855 is of great benefit to scholars of the great naturalist. In the early chapters Darwin’s symptoms are spelled out in precise and agonizing detail. These included “bad lips,” boils, depression, “extreme spasmodic daily & nightly flatulence,” headaches, heart palpitations, homesickness, hysterical crying, numb and unwell hands, malaise, physical weakness, seasickness, shivering, “violent eczema,” “violent fatigues,” and vomiting. Next Dr. Colp catalogs and probes the treatments, which started with those of his father, Dr. Robert Darwin (whose medical notes have not been found), his own diagnoses and remedies, and continued through the treatments of about 20 doctors, including Ayerst, Bence Jones, Brinton, Busk, Chapman, Andrew Clark, James Clark, Garrod, Gully, Holland, Jenner, and Lane. These are examined with microscopic precision with the greatest emphasis on the patient’s responses to them. The theories of all these doctors as well as those of the patient are probed with Dr. Colp’s well-known thoroughness.

Turning to the medicine men of our more modern pe-

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riod it has long been my impression that whenever doctors have a love of history, a “pet disease,” and spare time on their hands, they write an article or book on the illnesses of Darwin, George III, Hitler, Napoleon, or some other famous or infamous individual. Unlike Ralph Colp, Jr., who knew more about Darwin’s daily life and health than anyone since his last son died in 1943 (and probably anyone since Darwin’s wife Emma died in 1896), these physicians are not usually good researchers. Colp described and assessed the theories of Adler, Alvarez, Atkins, Barloon, Bowlby, Brussel, Foster, Goldstein, Good, Gould, Hubble, Johnston, Keith, Kempf, Noyes, Pickering, and others regarding the illnesses plaguing the great naturalist’s life. As a medical detective our author probed adrenal disease, arsenic poisoning, Chagas’ disease, Crohn’s disease, dysfunction of the immune system, skin disease, Systemic Lactose Intolerance, Systemic Lupus Erythematosus, and so forth. In the end, Chagas’ disease and psychosomatic explanations are identified as the primary culprits in his illness. The evidence for a major psychosomatic component to Darwin’s suffering is quite extensive, making Dr. Colp’s insights as a psychoanalytic psychiatrist all the more valuable.

His wife Emma reported to a relative in 1851 “that his health ‘was always affected by his mind’” (p. 183). The sight or even the mention of the word blood would cause him great “dis-ease.” At night, without the distractions of music, reading, or backgammon, he was prone to obsessive thoughts. Travel came to have a deleterious impact on his health, as visitors often did after he settled into the life of a gentleman naturalist and country squire in the Kentish hamlet of Down at age 35.

Colp’s volume is an encyclopedic work of monumental erudition. Indeed, it takes the form of an encyclopedia in its discussion of Darwin’s symptoms, treatments, and theories of illness. This makes it all the more usable for the

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scholar and those in the general public wishing to check on particular points.

Unlike most great men who typically are quite self-centered and cut off from other people in the pursuit of their own agenda, Charles Darwin was a kindly gentleman known for his sensitivity to the criticisms, feelings, needs, and opinions of others. As George Pickering pointed out in Creative Malady, illness for the great naturalist protected him from the interruptions of the world. Thus in the quiet backwater of Down village, in the womb of his family home, to the extent his health allowed Darwin could focus on his work, warding off interruptions since visits by others so often caused him great physical distress. Without his work, he became depressed, and—as enunciated by his wife did not find life worth living. The same could be said of the biographer of his illness, since Ralph Colp appeared quite depressed in his last year of life, since he could neither read due to his failing eyesight nor do any work. Ralph Colp shared many traits with the hero on whom he modeled parts of his life and about whose illnesses he has contributed a second invaluable, encyclopedic volume.

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