In rejecting God and promoting life as a product of blind evolution, Darwin was sinning against his own conscience and he suffered greatly for it. He was afraid of being branded “the Devil’s chaplain.” He was “destitute of faith, yet terrified at scepticism” (Desmond, Darwin, p. 268). “When Darwin did come out of his closet and bare his soul to a friend, he used a telling expression. He said it was ‘like confessing a murder’” (Desmond, p. xviii).

The full title to Adrian Desmond’s biography is Darwin: The Life of a Tormented Evolutionist. 

“He cut himself off, ducked parties and declined engagements; he even installed a mirror outside his study window to spy on visitors as they came up his drive. ... for years after reaching his rural retreat he refused to sleep anywhere else, unless it was a safe house, a close relative’s home. This was a worried man. ... He was living a double life with double standards, unable to broach his species work with anyone except Erasmus, for fear he be branded irresponsible, irreligious, or worse. It began to tell in the pit of his stomach” (pp. xix, 233).

Darwin suffered much of his life from debilitating sickness, so much so that he was largely a recluse and invalid during his the last 30 years of his life. Even in 1841, nearly 20 years before he published On the Origin of Species, he described himself as “a dull old spiritless dog” who only rarely had visitors (Desmond, p. 291). His sickness took the form of stomach problems, heart palpitations, vomiting, and eczema. “... a third of his working life was spent doubled up, trembling, vomiting, and dowsing himself in icy water” (Desmond, Darwin, p. xviii).

The Huxleys described Darwin’s house as “an infirmary where no one got well; here illness was the norm and health a strange affliction ... a strange sanatorium, where the family turned up like guests for their evening meal” (Desmond, Huxley, p. 291).

Before the publication of On the Origin of Species, Darwin had “uncomfortable palpitation of the heart” and a “terrible long fit of vomiting,” and upon the first sight of the book “one leg swelled like elephantiasis--eyes almost closed up--covered with a rash and fiery boils” (Desmond, Huxley, p. 257, Darwin, p. 233). He hid out for the next two months at a hydropathic spa, “living in Hell,” waiting for the furor to die down. 

The following description of Darwin’s condition in 1848 was typical:

“Waves of dizziness and despondency swept over him. Through the winter he suffered dreadful vomiting fits every week. His hands started trembling and he was ‘not able to do anything one day out of three.’ There were disquieting new symptoms: involuntary twitching, fainting feelings, and black spots before his eyes” (Desmond, Darwin, p. 361).

In 1865, Darwin described his pathetic condition to alternative therapy doctor John Chapman as follows:

“Age 56-57. For 25 years extreme spasmodic daily and nightly flatulence; occasional vomiting, on two occasions prolonged during months. Vomiting preceded by shivering, hysterical crying, dying sensations or half-faint, and copious very pallid urine. Now vomiting and every passage of flatulence preceded by ringing of ears, treading on air and vision. Focus and black dots, air fatigues, specially risky, brings on the head symptoms, nervousness when Emma leaves me.”

Darwin sought relief from a variety of quacks. He experimented with electric chains made of brass and zinc wires, which he looped around his neck and waist. He drenched his skin with vinegar. He followed a regimen of ice-bags in the small of the back three times a day for 90 minutes at a time. He half-starved himself on crash diets. But hydropathy was his favorite remedy. He spent months at hydropathic spas, particularly James Gully’s at Malvern, Worcestershire. There he was wrapped in wet sheets, drenched with buckets of cold water, lounged for hours in mineral springs, and fed cold biscuits and water for breakfast.

By 1871, the year he published The Descent of Man, Darwin was “a confirmed invalid” who “sat engulfed in fog, downhearted, drawing up his will” (Desmond, Darwin, p. 597).

Darwin’s sickness was thought by some to have been the product of his selfishness. “Self-absorbed, some thought self-centered, Charles demanded constant attention” (Desmond, Darwin, p. 335). 

His friends thought that he was a hypochondriac “because he routinely trotted his sickness out as an excuse.” 

By the end of his life, Darwin was an empty soul who had lost all ability to enjoy nature, art, music, and poetry. 

“In 1832, while walking in the midst of a Brazilian rainforest, [the young Darwin] was overwhelmed by wonder and awe. Surely, he thought, ‘there is more in man than the mere breath of his body’ (Darwin, Autobiography). ... Unfortunately, Darwin’s sense of the transcendent in nature did not survive. Reflecting near the end of his life on his earlier sense of awe in the rainforest, Darwin reported that now not even ‘the grandest scenes’ in nature would inspire such a reaction (Autobiography). The evidence of exquisite design and purpose he previously saw in nature failed once he had formulated his law of natural selection. Tragically, Darwin also reported that ‘now for many years I cannot endure to read a line of poetry ... I have also almost lost my taste for pictures or music ... My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts (Autobiography). Darwin’s view of nature seems to have left him empty” (John West, Endowed by Our Creator: The Bible, Science, and the Battle for America’s Soul, p. 128).

The previous study is excerpted from Seeing the Non-existent: Evolution’s Myths and Hoaxes, 638 pages, available as a free eBook at the Books section of www.wayoflife.org.