Darwin and His Stomach

by Andrew Kennedy

I am going to diagnose a celebrated case from history, the problem of Darwin’s stomach as an illustration of the kind of analytical process that a shiatsu practitioner may go through, and how that kind of diagnosis can complement orthodox medical viewpoints.

Darwin famously suffered from a bad stomach, which limited his desire for social engagements. He farted and retched continuously, and is often thought to have contracted some exotic stomach bug on his travels. His mysterious ailment, never pinned to any specific physical cause, has stimulated a lot of speculation about exotic infections, his delicate constitution, his psychosomatic mental state, his relationship with his father, his relationship with his mother, his relationship with his wife, his struggle with religious orthodoxy, and so on.

The key to his suffering, however, may be found in his simple observation made in 1838 that “I find the noodle and the stomach are antagonistic powers.” This immediately suggests to me that either he had a wheat or gluten intolerance or he had acquired celiac disease. His daughter Annie also had persistent indigestion and seemed to have died from stomach complications.

Darwin returned from his 5-year voyage on the Beagle in 1836 but manifested symptoms of his problems long before. As a child he was very sensitive to criticism and had bouts of stomach illness in stressful situations, often provoked by his father, a doctor, who was very dominant if not an actual bully, and who Darwin, in his autobiography, claimed was unfair to him as a child. (Sensitivity to justice is a characteristic of the small intestine in Chinese medicine.) Darwin switched from medicine to natural history at Edinburgh because of his “sensitivities” to bloody surgery. He had heart palpitations and pains in his chest even at the thought of going on his long voyage which he kept to himself for fear that he would not be allowed to go.

Darwin, however, lived relatively long for someone allegedly in the throes of an exotic illness (73 years). He had a happy childhood and was not fundamentally afraid of people and society. According to his autobiography, he was very happy at as a student Cambridge, belonged to a partying set, was passionate about shooting, and spent extravagantly. He certainly enjoyed his scientific meetings in later life, though admitted that they made him too “excited”. He complained that he had to give up dinner parties even though he enjoyed them (“ … such parties always put me into high spirits.” I know this feeling well. Living apart for long periods to write creates a form of sensibility such that social contact – even a telephone call – leaves me uncomfortably jazzed for hours afterwards and any group gathering leaves me uncomfortably high.)

Darwin enjoyed symptom-free times when he could get down to his work. A very telling episode occurred in 1838, only 2 years after he had returned from his voyage. Suffering badly from his symptoms and unable to work, he went on a geological field trip to Scotland, where, camping out in the wilderness and eating frugally, he felt fully cured. Later, In 1848, he tried a so-called water cure peddled by Dr. James Gully at Malvern, which seemed to have cured him temporarily and about which he enthused. One of the key elements of the cure was a strict diet – another important clue to his condition.

He married his cousin, Emma Wedgwood, in 1839, and although psychologists have written that the two of them had a distorted mother-child relationship (Darwin would write in very babyish language to his wife from time to time), and that Darwin was unhealthily reliant on Emma’s presence (understandable given his affliction), they obviously had a busy sex life, since they managed to have 10 children between 1839 and 1856, the first 8 produced in the first 10 years of marriage.

From the Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) point of view, the seat of Darwin’s problem was not in his stomach, his earth element, but in his small intestine (where celiac disease occurs). Earth is the place of social being, of practical solutions, of basic balance and contentedness in daily life, all of which Darwin possessed. Where the earth element fails to be nourished by fire (small intestine), problems would arise such as anxiety, feelings of displacement and lack of “rootedness” which inevitably lead to waves of feelings of agoraphobia and lack of “get-up-and-go.”

In TCM philosophy, the earth element is where influences unite in their natural combinations. It is where our actions come to their conclusions. Born out of the mind, it is the strongly physical or visceral state that enables us to enjoy and make sense of life. The stomach is an organ strongly yang in energy; it is the component that literally digests the world, makes sense of it, and derives from it what we need to maintain our lives. The yin component of the earth element is the pancreas-spleen combination. This controls and moves the denser fraction of corporeal fluids which irrigates the tissues and organs and maintains their quality of function.

Earth types are sensitive to justice and to being treated fairly. When balanced, earth types are well “rooted,” stable, and productive; know what they know; and are unlikely to shift easily from a course of action or a belief. They are also generally sweet tempered, kind, and sociable. People in whom earth is the dominant element are stable, calm, smell sweet, and tend to provoke in others a desire to manage and organise them. Darwin’s earth was strong; he had found his place to be and to rest and was happy in it while his mind digested a great deal of facts and made sense of them.

Now, the earth element is produced and nourished by fire, which governs four organs – heart, small intestine, pericardium, and “triple heater.” The triple heater, a mysterious energy channel unrelated to any particular organ or tissue, distributes the lighter fractions of the body’s energy around the body and also governs the ear. The small intestine in particular governs the extraction of pure fluids derived from digestion and is connected to the health of the skin, but also to the origins of self-criticism and worries over imperfections. Some of the many symptoms of celiac disease are skin problems and a herpeslike skin disease. Darwin suffered from what he called eczema. In 1863 he had a particularly bad bout of it when his skin became too raw to suffer the water cure (part of which involved being wrapped in wet towels) that he believed would help.

The earth element (to which the stomach belongs) is managed by wood. Disorders in earth are connected to the liver, a wood organ, which supplies the blood and chi to the heart, which is the seat of the mind in TCM but also determines the levels of blood in the spleen/pancreas organ, the yin component of the earth element. Disorders of the liver show up in anger or depression, in overwork or lack of it, muddled thinking or lack of clarity, insomnia, and restlessness. If the spleen/pancreas does not have enough blood and yang energy to do its job in passing blood and nourishment to the body’s organs, intestinal problems result.

Darwin was not an angry man, however. Although he was organized, he was not an obsessive about it, and he was able to work steadily. Another point about the wood-earth connection is the how the excess control of wood leads to acid reflux and a need to vomit. The healthy earth energy of pancreas/spleen, being yin, descends into the lower torso and when deficient in yang tends to collect in the intestines, creating sensations of bloat or swellings, whereas the earth energy of the stomach, being yang, has a tendency to rise into the throat when not anchored by sufficient yin energy. When the liver is blocked from functioning, heat results, which attacks the yang component of the earth element (the stomach) and forces energy upwards. But Darwin did not vomit food (not all celiac disease sufferers have this symptom), though he did sometimes complain of acid in the mouth after meals, all of which suggests that his problem was not confined to the liver-stomach relationship but also involved his small intestine. This was most likely to have been caused by celiac disease or gluten sensitivities.

His skin problems and the similar sufferings of his daughter Anne, which began after an immune system attack, also suggest it. (Darwin did wonder about the closeness of his and his wife’s common heritage – they were cousins – bearing on the health of his children, though at the time he knew nothing about genes and how they worked.) He died of what appeared to be coronary thrombosis, and certainly celiac disease is implicated in a higher risk of heart failure, through inflammation (in TCM, both heart and small intestine are grouped together under the fire element) and poor absorption of good fats.

Two years before, in 1849, Anne, who was, according to Darwin, a delightful and well-balanced child and taller than average (a trait not normally associated with celiac disease in children), had a serious bout of scarlet fever, and from then on her health declined. She was treated with the same water therapy as Darwin in Gully’s Malvern clinic for several weeks but did not respond, and died in 1851, after seriously vomiting daily, of what was called “bilious fever of typhoid character.” Celiac disease, being an immune system disease, can appear suddenly at any time and is often triggered by a stressful bout of illness. It is also has a heritable component, so Annie’s death sadly may have confirmed her father’s condition.

First serial rights © 2014 Andrew Kennedy

Contact: andrew.shiatsu@gmail.com