skip to content

Darwin Correspondence Project

Darwin's health

ice_bag_treatment.jpg

1873 advertisement for John Chapman’s spinal ice bag treatment.
Internet Archive/Open Knowledge Commons/Harvard Medical School, http://archive.org/details/casesofneuralgia00chap

Darwin's notes for his physician, 1865

On 20 May 1865, Emma Darwin recorded in her diary that John Chapman, a prominent London publisher who had studied medicine in London and Paris in the early 1840s, visited Down to consult with Darwin about his ill health. In 1863 Chapman started to treat epilepsy with ice and developed a theory of ‘neuro-dynamic medicine’ according to which many diseases were treatable through applications of heat or cold to the spine over long periods.

Read more

Darwin's health

On 28 March 1849, ten years before Origin was published, Darwin wrote to his good friend Joseph Hooker from Great Malvern in Worcestershire, where Dr James Manby Gully ran a fashionable water-cure establishment. Darwin apologised for his delayed reply to Hooker’s letter which he put down to his exceptionally poor health:

Read more