Food
No man is a hero to his stomach. It is a source of comfort to the envious that geniuses are just as shackled by diet as the rest of us - just as chained to their own digestive processes. Take Charles Darwin (1809-82). No individual has done more to change our perception of the universe. He fathomed the origin of species from squid to dandelion, from cherry to ape. He understood "the descent of man" as it had never been understood. Yet he never got to grips with the rumblings and retchings in his own tummy, which tortured the poor man for more than half his life.
Darwin hadn't always had digestive troubles. As a lad growing up in a well-to-do Shrewsbury family, he displayed a foppish gusto for roast beef and partridge shooting. At Edinburgh University, where he studied medicine, he tucked into local stewed herrings and fried oysters. He resented lecture time because it cut into breakfast time; he yawned through lessons on the properties of rhubarb. If Charles had followed his father, Robert, into the medical profession, maybe he, too, would have become corpulent and complacent. Darwin senior weighed 330lb.
But it was not to be. At the age of 22, Charles was engaged as a naturalist on board HMS Beagle, circumnavigating the globe, a four-and-a-half-year journey that vastly expanded his knowledge of food, as well as changing the course of his entire life. In Bahia Blanco, he ate ostrich egg dumplings (actually rhea) and roast armadillo, noting that armadillos, "cooked without their cases, taste and look like duck". Agouti, a large chocolate-coloured rodent, was "the very best meat I ever tasted". On a trek to Buenos Aires, he ate like a gaucho, "nothing but meat" roasted over a fire. He downed mate tea like a native. The tropical fruits of Tahiti amazed him - breadfruit, pineapple and guava. His Tahitian guide cooked him strips of baked bananas and fish, and beef wrapped in leaves. In the Cocos Islands, Darwin remarked "how delicious it is . . . to drink the cool pleasant fruit of the Cocoa Nut".
It sounds like gastronomic heaven. But for at least two reasons the Beagle voyage was a disaster for Darwin's stomach. In the first place, he was a martyr to seasickness. In the second, the shattering discovery he made as a result of this trip - the principle of natural selection - was to cause him anxieties that triggered decades of nausea, flatulence and vomiting, symptoms that were never adequately diagnosed, let alone cured.
On his return, Darwin just couldn't keep food down. Public appearances made him sick. So did going to London. So did pondering the implications of his theory for Christianity, in which he had once believed. And so did the prospect of taking on the scientific establishment with On the Origin of Species, which only appeared 20 years after he had first conceived it. At one point he calculated that four-fifths of his working day was lost in trembling and vomiting.
Ever the scientist, Darwin sent off phials of his vomit for testing. All kinds of diets were tried. A Dr Gully treated him with hydropathy - gallons of mineral water, no sugar, salt, bacon or "anything good" and bracing cold douches. A Dr Clark took the opposite approach - a "dry diet" of toast and minimal fluids. This left Darwin gasping for "a wine-glass of water", but still wracked by sickness. He died in 1882, begging for death, after a prolonged bout of retching.
Poor, unfortunate Darwin! The origin of his indigestion proved a more intractable problem than the origin of species.
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