Part 3

Darwin, His Daughter, and Human Evolution
by Randal Keynes

(Page 3 of 5)

Charles might also have heard, or thought he heard, or sensed, cries from the operating theatre in the hospital across the road. The surgeon, Robert Liston, had been a well-known figure at the Royal Infirmary in Edinburgh when Charles studied medicine there twelve years before. Charles had given up his medical studies, partly because he was distressed by patients' suffering during operations without anaesthetic. At University College Hospital, Liston continued to improve the methods that had gained him his reputation at Edinburgh. His great skill was speed, essential for any major surgery because of the trauma of pain and loss of blood. He could amputate a leg in under thirty seconds. A casebook for his operations, with doodles of cut-throat razors on the cover, is still kept in the medical school. In January 1840, a country girl aged nineteen was admitted with a tumour of the right lower jaw. "The patient being seated in a chair, Mr Liston extracted the lateral incisor tooth...The jaw was then partly sawn through and its division completed with the cutting pliers...The operation lasted eight or nine minutes and was borne with the most heroic fortitude by the patient." Six years later, effective anaesthetics came into use. In 1846, Liston performed the first operation under ether in London, and a newspaper proclaimed: "We have conquered pain!"

But the wailing whistle and patients' cries were some way away. Charles found the stillness in his new study a welcome contrast to the many noises he had had to put up with in Great Marlborough Street. He wrote to his cousin and close friend William Darwin Fox, a clergyman in Cheshire: "If one is quiet in London, there is nothing like its quietness-there is a grandeur about its smoky fogs, and the dull distant sounds of cabs and coaches." Emma, though, remembered "how the passage of a rattling cab seemed in the night a matter of eternity."

Two days after Charles and Emma's wedding, his elder sister Caroline lost her six-week-old baby. Emma's sister Elizabeth wrote: "She does her utmost not to yield, but she is very unwell, and I never felt greater pity for anyone in my life." Caroline's husband Josiah Wedgwood III was now running the factory for his father with some reluctance. Elizabeth wrote bitterly that the loss of their child would make him "not so unwilling to go as usual to his employment, but what poor Caroline will find to do I cannot think; for the last so many months the thoughts of this precious child and the preparations for it have occupied her in an intense way that I never saw in anyone else."

In April, Emma found that she was pregnant. In August she noted in her diary: "Half way now, I think, from symptoms." She and Charles were living a full life, visiting and receiving many friends including their cousin Dr. Henry Holland and his wife, the Lyells, Thomas and Jane Carlyle, the mathematician Charles Babbage (known in the family as Baggage), Professor Richard Owen of the Royal College of Surgeons and Harriet Martineau the writer. Charles and Emma went together to the Zoological Gardens, to Handel's Messiah and Bellini's La Sonnambula. They sampled sermons at a number of churches, and attended the Unitarian Chapel in Little Portland Street, another new "Greek" building, where Hensleigh and Fanny Wedgwood worshipped. The minister, James Tagart, preached the future triumph of Unitarian Christianity, rejecting the doctrine of the depravity of human nature and emphasising social concord, domestic piety and fraternal union.

When Emma was due to give birth, her sister Elizabeth came to be with her, and Charles engaged a doctor to attend. There were different views at the time about childbirth and the pain of delivery. Some considered "the endurance of pain during delivery essential to the fulfilment of the primaeval curse, consequent upon the temptation and fall of our first mother, Eve." But one obstetrician wrote that childbirth was a natural process and suggested that "no sentiment is more pregnant with mischief than the opinion which almost universally prevails, that this process is inevitably one of difficulty and danger."

Another obstetrician suggested how the doctor should cope with the shyness of a young lady having her first child. "In the case of a woman who has been long married, and has borne children before, there is no difficulty or delay on the score of delicacy. The nurse brings you towels and hog's lard at once...But a newly-married woman dislikes and dreads the examination; and, therefore, you sit down by the bedside, and talk to her about other things. Presently the nurse asks how the baby is lying; and this makes the lady anxious about it. A pain comes on, and you relieve it by putting your hand on the sacrum. When the next pain comes on, introduce one or two fingers of the other hand into the vagina; ascertain that the passages are all right; and the arch of the pubis, and the outlet of the pelvis, natural. Then feel for the os uteri..." After the delivery, the doctor should tie the umbilical cord, place a cap on the baby's head and hand it to the companion who would have a flannel or woollen shawl to wrap the child in. "Do not stay to nurse your patient...for it alarms her, and you get bothered."

Charles and Emma's first child was born on 29 December. It was a boy, and he was christened William Erasmus, both Darwin family names. They called him Doddy first, then Willy as he grew into childhood. Charles wrote to his cousin Fox: "What an awful affair a confinement is; it knocked me up, almost as much as it did Emma herself." He mentioned in another letter that he had become a father. "The event occurred last Friday week: it is a little prince." On 10 February, Emma wrote in her diary: "Baby smiled for the first time." And the next day, as she thought of spring flowers in the dirt and cold of the London winter, "Baby made little noises. Got the hyacinths." Charles wrote to Robert FitzRoy, his captain on HMS Beagle, about "my little animalcule of a son." This word was a naturalist's term for living organisms so small that they could not be seen by the naked eye; FitzRoy might have thought of the creatures that Charles had fished eagerly from the sea onto the deck of HMS Beagle, and studied so intently with his microscope in the poop cabin.

Charles was surprised by his absorption in his son. He wrote to Fox in June: "He is a charming little fellow, and I had not the smallest conception there was so much in a five-month baby. You will perceive by this, that I have a fine degree of paternal fervour." "He is a prodigy of beauty and intellect. He is so charming that I cannot pretend to any modesty. I defy anybody to flatter us on our baby, for I defy anyone to say anything in its praise, of which we are not fully conscious."

Emma was to have eight more children in the next twelve years. Her life was a treadmill of pregnancy, delivery, suckling, weaning and waiting for the next conception. After bearing her fifth child, she wondered if she might have "the luck to escape having another soon," but Charles does not seem to have appreciated her feelings. Shortly afterwards she wrote about the possibility of "having a respite" for another year, but her sixth child was conceived five months later.

Copyright © January 2002, Riverhead Books, a division of Penguin Putnam, Inc. Used by permission.

About the Author

Randal Keynes is a great-great grandson of Charles Darwin. He is also a descendant of the economist John Maynard Keynes.