By Jodie Noel Vinson

Excursion to St. Fé—Thistle Beds—Habits of the Bizcacha—Little Owl—Saline Streams—Level Plain—Mastodon—St. Fé—Change in Landscape—Geology—Tooth of extinct Horse . . . Flocks of Butterflies—Aeronaut Spiders—Phosphorescence of the Sea—Port Desire—Guanaco—Port St. Julia—Geology of Patagonia—Fossil gigantic Animal . . . Causes of Extinction

(Charles Darwin, Voyage of the Beagle)

Tongue crimson in morning ulcerated—stomach constricted dragging—Feet coldish—Pulse 58 to 62—or slower and like thread. Appetite good—not thin. Evacuation regular and good. Urine scanty (because do not drink) often much pinkish sediment when cold—seldom headache or nausea.—Cannot walk abv ½ mile—always tired—conversation or excitement tires me much

(Charles Darwin, note to Dr. Chapman)

Charles Darwin had “taken the horizontal,” as he would have put it as a seasick young man on board the Beagle. He lay in bed, snowy beard cascading over the coverlet that shrouded his six-foot frame. Emma could see her husband was in so much pain he was “longing to die.” Their daughter Henrietta, hovering bedside, lamented how “this terrible nausea still goes on.” Darwin, before passing away on that April afternoon in 1882 at age seventy-three, answered with the equanimity of one who has lived in daily discomfort: “It is not terrible. But it is nausea.”

At this point, Darwin had been ill for over half his life. “I was almost quite broken down,” he described his chronic ailment in a journal, “head swimming, hands trembling and never a week without violent vomiting.” The naturalist took copious notes on his malady over the years, during which his stomach caused him “incessant discomfort, I may say misery,” as he once wrote to his cousin William Fox, predicting: “I shall go to my grave, I suppose, grumbling and growling with daily, almost hourly, discomfort.”

*

I’m on the couch, scrolling through my newsfeed, when the first signs appear at a protest against lockdown. YOUR HEALTH is NOT more important than MY Liberties!! From the screen of my laptop I read the dripping pink letters, painted on the rear window of a white Volvo SUV, aloud to my husband, who hasn’t left the apartment for over a month. Marc is washing dishes on a stool we ordered because, fifty days after a Covid infection, standing makes us weak. At thirty-seven, the more we exert ourselves the worse we feel; every effort followed by a flurry of symptoms: nausea, palpitations, bone-deep fatigue.

Leaden limbs anchor me to couch cushions. Beneath ribs tender to the touch, my breath ebbs as if at low tide; gauzy clouds of cumulus fill my frontal cortex. If I had energy, I’d make my own sign: YOUR liberties are NOT more important than MY HEALTH. But because it’s a false dichotomy, it doesn’t work in reverse. Saying it backward won’t solve anything.

Maybe I’d paraphrase Obama: Your liberty depends on my being free, too. Or: Health IS Freedom. Before I can suggest the slogan, another sign slides down my screen, clutched by a protestor who’s penned their message in black permanent marker on red posterboard: SACRIFICE THE WEAK.

*

“It has been a bitter mortification for me to digest the conclusion that the ‘race is for the strong,’” Darwin wrote geologist Charles Lyell. He’d been forced to turn down secretaryship of the Geological Society, begging ill health after his voyage on the Beagle: “Of late, anything which flurries me completely knocks me up afterwards and brings on violent palpitation of the heart.”

Yet Darwin couldn’t give up his work, confessing to botanist Joseph Hooker, “I would sooner be the wretched contemptible invalid, which I am, than live the life of an idle squire.” Hooker was one of Darwin’s medical confidants. On many mornings at Darwin’s residence at Down House, he also served as a sounding board for controversial theories.

Hooker often arrived just after the Darwins breakfasted. Emma would show him to the study, where he could glimpse Darwin’s balding pate over the high back of his elegant, olive-green chair. The polished mahogany of the frame ended abruptly at cast-iron legs. As the chair rasped and wheeled on its casters, his friend’s face would appear: Darwin’s broad forehead protruded to meet prominent eyebrows, a trait that would prompt caricatures resembling the apes from whom he claimed descent.

Within a few hours of conversation covering “questions botanical, geographical, etc.,” the naturalist’s countenance would blossom with a disfiguring eczema that eventually inspired him to grow a beard. (When, years later, a hirsute Darwin arrived at the 1866 Royal Society Soirée, Hooker had trouble recognizing him.) Features inflamed, Darwin would retreat to bed: exhausted, head buzzing, “stars in the eyes.”

Despite taking periods of rest, Darwin was often too sick to work. “At present,” he wrote to his cousin Fox, “I only want vigour.” In that letter, Darwin relayed a history of life since his return from the Beagle expedition: “I was for nearly six months in very indifferent health, so that I felt the smallest exertion irksome . . . I had no spirits to do anything. I have scarcely put pen to paper for the last half year and everything . . . is going backwards.”

*

Defeated, Darwin went to bed at ten o’clock. Emma beat him at their nightly game of Backgammon. He ate his dinner—tea with an egg—and read from a novel. The last dregs of energy were spent on a late afternoon work session. Reclining on the sofa, he answered the day’s correspondence. He lunched with the family, called at the greenhouse, enjoyed a mid-morning walk, and repaired to the study to work. Darwin retired to the couch to read the morning post.

If he was unwell, Emma read his mail to him. When a letter arrived bearing the seal of the Reverend Professor Adam Sedgwick, Darwin was eager to hear its contents. As his wife began, “My dear Darwin…” he lay back, flushed with anticipation, taking in the reaction of his one-time geology instructor to his latest book.

Were his theory to take hold, Sedgwick warned his former pupil in that letter of 1859, “humanity…would suffer a damage that might brutalize it—and sink the human race into a lower grade of degradation than any into which it has fallen since its written records tell us of its history.”

Many, like Sedgwick, saw grave implications in Darwin’s work. Should the idea of evolution supplant a creator-god, it might open a moral vacuum where the standard for human behavior had been shaped. Darwin’s origin story was so new, there’d not been time to see what ideological frameworks might be built on its foundations: whether imaginations would be kindled, as Darwin’s had been, by the force of life developed over eons, or feel degraded by an ancestor who was an ape; whether compassion could survive a scale that set humans off-center in the immense scope of time his hypothesis required, or if such a perspective would inspire deeper care for all species, to which, his theory suggested, we are intimately related.

Read backward, through the dark cloud of the mid-20^th century, Sedgwick’s words take on ominous portents, though at the time no one could have foreseen the consequences wrought when a biological theory was exploited on the social and political stage. By the time Origin of the Species was published, some were calling Darwin “the most dangerous man in England.”

*

It’s October 2020, and the most powerful man in the world is sick. He’s burning with fever; his blood oxygen levels have dipped precariously low. The president of the United States is rushed to the hospital, where he will receive—but not admit to having received—supplemental oxygen, along with a cocktail of experimental treatments.

When reviewing his initial symptoms, the then-president said he’d felt “more weakness than anything else,” confessing: “I didn’t feel very strong. I didn’t feel very vital. I didn’t feel like the President of the United States should feel.”

Donald Trump’s inability to imagine anything but a strong, able-bodied leader had been forecast on The Apprentice, NBC’s elimination-based TV show in which entrepreneurs competed to run one of Trump’s companies. The show was modeled on its predecessor in reality television: Survivor.

“You don’t believe in the genetic pool?” Trump asked contestant Sam in the first Board Room meeting, when episode one aired in the early aughts. “That what you have, you have?”

Sam has just been denounced by his team for enlisting beautiful women to sell lemonade during the first challenge, in which contestants competed to launch a successful kiosk. Scenting defeat, Sam hits back hard, desperately hard. “I’ve got genetic pool big time, Mr. Trump, just like you got from your father Fred Trump and your mother Mary Trump.”

The host listens, banishing a quieter contender instead.

*

At first, Darwin kept quiet. His letters to Hooker were full of misgivings, doubts crouched in cringing parentheticals: “I am almost convinced (quite contrary to the opinion I started with) that species are not (it is like confessing a murder) immutable…I think I have found out (here’s presumption!) the simple way by which species become exquisitely adapted to various ends.” He worried about how his ideas would be received: “I dare say I shall stand infinitely low in the opinion of all sound Naturalists—so this is my prospect for the future,” he wrote his friend as he finished up Voyage of the Beagle and began, rather than prepare his theory for publication, to work on barnacles, in what reads in retrospect like a form of procrastination.

Darwin’s hesitation went deeper than fear of his idea’s reception. He struggled with the “extreme difficulty or rather impossibility of conceiving this immense and wonderful universe, including man with his capacity of looking far backwards and far into futurity, as the result of blind chance or necessity.” Enamored with the natural world, Darwin found it hard to accept the quiet war that waged within the woods he loved to walk. His hypothesis solved for phenomena such as “the sting of the bee causing the bee’s own death,” but it also meant he had to accept some of those hard truths. “The contrivances of nature,” Darwin’s theory forces us to concede, are not “absolutely perfect.” Some might even be “abhorrent to our ideas of fitness.”

*

Meryl Streep stands at the podium of the 2017 Golden Globes, the gem-studded bodice of her dress glittering in the spotlight. “There was one performance this year that stunned me,” she announces, her voice strained. “It made its intended audience laugh and show their teeth.” The actress is referring to presidential candidate Donald Trump’s imitation of a reporter’s disability at a campaign rally leading up to the 2016 election. During the speech Trump pauses: The poor guy—you gotta see this guy. He cocks his right elbow, wrist bent at an acute angle as he flails both arms about his body.

“This instinct to humiliate, when it’s modeled by someone in the public platform, by someone powerful,” Streep warns, “it filters down into everybody’s life.”

By the time Trump made his infamous speech, he no longer dominated the Board Room of The Apprentice. It’s unclear whether anyone at NBC had the pleasure of dishing the real estate magnate’s infamous catch phrase, You’re fired, back at him, but he was let go after making racially-charged remarks during his run for the presidency. When season fifteen aired, Trump had been replaced by a fitter candidate: Arnold Schwarzenegger.

*

Darwin walked at a meditative pace, kicking a flint pebble from a small pile each time he looped his property. He’d been back in England long enough to marry his cousin Emma, begin a family, and settle at Down, their country estate. All the while, in his mind’s eye, a picture had begun to form. At the far right: a man stood tall, spine straight, marching forward. Behind him, a shorter person walked, shoulders slumped, followed by a smaller man stooped into almost simian posture. The figure receded, not only shrinking in stature, but bending low, arms lengthening until, at the far left, knuckles brushed the ground.

Darwin completed a third loop. From the window of Down House, his children watched their father dispatch a flint and begin another lap. The idea, it seemed, was working out to be a “four-pebble problem.”

His theory would be difficult to prove. The fossil record, for one, was incomplete: Darwin was missing evidence of an unfathomable number of intermediary species. Beyond proofs, there were beliefs: those of his church and country, which held species to be immutable, defined entities made by a being surpassing, and yet the model for—and therefore comprehendible to—human intelligence.

Darwin quit the path for his study. To develop his theories, he often worked in reverse. He began by observing a scene or specimen, then speculated, imagining what he called “castles in the sky.” He spent years collecting the facts that would allow him to bring his castle to earth. In this way, Darwin worked from an observation back to its seed—its origin.

*

Trump espoused views about the genetic pool long before The Apprentice aired. “The coal miner gets black-lung disease, his son gets it, then his son,” he declared in a 1990 interview with Playboy. “If I had been the son of a coal miner, I would have left the damn mines. But most people don’t have the imagination—or whatever—to leave their mine. They don’t have ‘it’ …You’re either born with it or you’re not.”

This kind of statement seems to arise from Social Darwinism, the belief that the market is an infallible compass for distributing wealth, allowing the worthy to rise to the top. Capitalism rewards the fittest, proponents of this philosophy claim, regardless of social circumstance.

Social Darwinism did not begin with Darwin, but with Herbert Spencer, a mid-nineteenth century philosopher who mistook the market for nature, equating moral goodness with that which outlasted the competition, and from whom we inherited the phrase “survival of the fittest.” When it came to the infirm, Spencer wrote: “it is best they should die.”

Taking up this line, Darwin’s half-cousin, Sir Francis Galton, father of eugenics, argued around the turn of the century against welfare programs and asylums that allowed “inferior humans” to reproduce. During the decade leading up to World War II, this “science” would take hold in America, justifying the forced sterilization of thousands deemed unfit.

Less than a century after Origin was published, on the heels of the eugenics craze in America, the Nazi party’s approximation of natural selection as applied to a “master race” would permit the mass elimination of disabled people. Aktion T4, which killed 70,000 before it went underground in 1941, was a forerunner of the concentration camps. Its proponents claimed to be making room in hospitals for the wounded bodies of the strong. As Hitler put it: “Wartime is the best time for the elimination of the incurably ill.”

At this point the Führer could say something like this; he’d been practically deified. An immutable word that reads the same backwards as it does forwards.

*

Ideas, like traits, filter down. Both, over generations, reappear in different contexts: the prominent nose of a great uncle set against the round cheeks of a nephew; Darwin’s ill health evident in the symptoms of his children. However warped the outcome of marrying natural selection to politics, Darwin’s theory did not exempt humankind, nor were Darwin and his family unaware of its implications for their own lives. At fifty-five, his brother Erasmus wrote Darwin: “My ague has left me in such a state of torpidity that I wish I had gone through the process of natural selection.”

 “She inherits I fear with grief, my wretched digestion,” Darwin described his daughter Annie’s waning health. Of his ten children, eight survived. George had an irregular pulse. Henrietta was often in bed with stomach complaints. His last child and namesake, who died in infancy, was described as “backward in walking and talking.” When Leonard, who Darwin also feared was “rather slow and backward,” was recovering from a fever, his father wrote “all Darwins…ought to be exterminated.”

Darwin—and, we can only hope, Darwin’s brother—was being ironic. He loved his children: when he and Emma buried ten-year-old Annie near a favorite health spa in 1851, Darwin could no longer return there for treatment. The death wish was hyperbole, a way of expressing distress over an illness so intense it eluded even the words of this prolific observer.

Yet Darwin knew his theory’s harsh realities. He’d observed evidence of the massive death of entire species. He’d also watched firsthand as Europeans used dominant force (firearms) to conquer indigenous peoples, surveying the oppression with some lamentation, while still ascribing to the idea of a society’s “betterment” through contact with his own people. Other times he saw with sorrow further into the future, in which the islanders he encountered were overwhelmed, numbers recessing into nothing, the fate of the fossilized species he studied.

This bleak prospect made Darwin’s hypothesis hard to accept. It offended convention and later lent itself to the warped whims of a madman. But evolutionary theory also forced an individual to acknowledge their own vulnerability: what had happened to the mastodon, to the tooth of an extinct horse, could happen to your children, could happen to you.

*

The kitchen stool isn’t the only thing my husband and I purchase to adjust to our new limits. When, a year into illness, focused work or an extended walk continue to bring on nausea and fatigue, flushes, rashes, and hives, we buy brightly colored compression socks that run up to our knees. Over these we wear black spandex tights studded with reflective patches that make us look like the athletes we aren’t but long to be. We order gallons of Gatorade; some days the sugary sports drink laced with electrolytes seems the only thing that can make me feel marginally better. We move about the apartment at a snail’s pace, wary of triggering symptoms.

On support groups and webinars, we begin listening to experts in acronymic conditions that can follow a viral infection: ME/CFS, MCAS, POTS. We learn how to understand our intolerance to standing, how to manage depleted energy reserves, how to adapt to our bodies’ sudden boundaries. Compression, hydration, and salt, we discover, can help with the imbalance in the autonomic nervous system, which controls blood pressure and heartrate, flushing and sweating, the impulse for fight or flight.

Our days are divided into periods of activity and rest, our energy quantified, itemized, inventoried. If I spend it on one thing, I won’t be able to do the next. Early on, when talking makes me short on breath, I mute myself on Zoom meetings, using the chat box to communicate with colleagues. Other times, when even working from home is out of reach, we take dwindling sick days and lie on the couch for long, horizontal hours.

*

Darwin dined at six. At five o’clock: more cold water. He napped, lunched at one, walked the woods surrounding the spa. At noon his feet were submerged in ice water and mustard, and briskly rubbed. He breakfasted. Applied a wet compress. Invigorated, he walked for twenty minutes. The naturalist scrubbed his front while the washerman rubbed him down from the back, leaving him looking “very much like a lobster.” Darwin woke at quarter to seven.

Outside of the sanatorium where Darwin began the sodden rigors of hydrotherapy in 1849, the naturalist kept a strict agenda, protecting his body against the tendency to “flurry” after periods of work. “It is almost impossible, except for those who watched his daily life, to realise how essential to his well-being was the regular routine,” his son Frances observed, “and with what pain and difficulty anything beyond it was attempted.” Darwin divided his day into slices that allowed him to recover from each exertion: sessions in his study followed by intervals on the couch, abbreviated walks interspersed with bedroom interludes.

Even his posture was modified. During intermittent periods of leisure, Darwin reclined on a sofa or bed, flat on his back, sometimes with his hands behind his head, a method he’d used to manage seasickness aboard the Beagle. In the evening he sat “very erect” in a high chair, placing his feet on another seat as a preventative measure “to keep off giddiness and nausea,” as he explained to confounded visitors, and “to guard his weakness.”

Believing London’s air to be harmful to his health, in 1842 Darwin made a change in environment, moving his family into rural Down House, where he’d dwell for the rest of his life. Soon after arriving, he began alterations. Darwin refashioned his study to sustain longer work shifts, replacing the base of his office chair with the legs of a bedstead, so he might wheel between specimens without recourse to standing.

Perhaps his greatest renovation was the Sandwalk, a 1.5-acre strip of land circled by a path canopied with hazel and birch. There his towering figure could be seen, hands clasped behind back, head bent to study the ground before stepping forward. Darwin often strolled at this measured clip; his son George would remember him “just quietly putting down his foot and then waiting before the next step,” a habit picked up in the forests of Brazil—where he crept to closely observe the inhabitants—and which now conserved his fast-spent energy at Down.

A Dr. Lane described Darwin on walks around Moor Park, where he repaired for water treatment. Watching his patient’s wizened frame move in slow contemplation through the trees, Lane detected hints of the youthful naturalist. Darwin, the doctor observed, “was literally ‘all eyes.’ Nothing escaped him. No object in nature, whether Flower, or Bird, or Insect of any kind, could avoid his loving recognition.” These walks could “carry him back to his great voyage in the Beagle, with countless anecdotes of all he saw of nature and of men in the course of it.”

*

On March 20, 1835, Darwin began the “tedious ascent” of Peuquenes Ridge. For a few days he’d journeyed from Santiago into the Andes, accompanied by Chileno guides. Four years into his travels, the young naturalist had summited several lofty peaks. This ridge, which separated waters flowing into the Pacific from those that fed the Atlantic, rose over 13,000 feet above the sea.

In the rarefied atmosphere, even the mules stopped every fifty yards to catch their breath. The Chilenos called the effects of the thin air puna. Darwin felt a “slight tightness across the head and chest, like that felt on leaving a warm room and running quickly into frosty weather.” His guides prescribed onions.

Darwin found a different cure. Upon discovering the fossils of sea life embedded in the rock—evidence even this soaring range was once below water—the traveler was so elated he “entirely forgot the puna.” From these altitudinous heights, no weakness was in view.

Perhaps because of this record of robust activity, when he returned, Darwin’s theories were not the only thing to need defending. The illness he contended with daily was also cause for doubt. “Many of my friends,” Darwin confessed to Hooker, “think me a hypochondriac.”

The doctors of his day were running up against the frontiers of medical science. Rather than admit ignorance, some dismissed his ongoing symptoms, or lumped them into a catch-all diagnosis such as “suppressed gout.” Others were more inventive, treating Darwin with strict diets, cold compresses, brisk rub-downs with wet sheets.

In the future, scholars would apply advances in medical knowledge to posthumously diagnose Darwin. In 2014, geneticists identified biomarkers for Crohn’s disease on DNA sourced from two strands of Darwin’s beard, preserved by Henrietta and passed down to progeny in tissue paper marked “remaining hair.” In 1997, D.A.B. Young proposed the naturalist had been afflicted with systemic lupus erythematosus, an inflammatory autoimmune disease. In 1959, Saul Adler identified “the great black bug of the pampas” that bit Darwin in 1835 as a probable carrier of the protozoan that causes Chagas’ disease.

Others, according to Ralph Colp, who records each theory in To Be an Invalid, proposed a range of disorders: appendicitis; chronic cholecystitis; “smouldering hepatitis”; arsenic poisoning; a duodenal ulcer; a diaphragmatic hernia; a severe allergy, possibly to pigeons. Going back further, you find a prevalence of psychoanalytic theories, in which doctors attribute Darwin’s illness to everything from anxiety to Emma’s solicitous care of her ailing husband.

These hypotheses, which undermine the scientist’s own record, took root during Darwin’s lifetime when his illness was denied by contemporaries who, according to his daughter, believed “his ill health to be more imaginary than real.” After suffering for over a decade, Darwin admitted that “most think I am shamming.”

*

From the onset of illness, Marc and I struggle to find medical help: in the early days of the pandemic, hospital beds are reserved for the gravely ill. When the emergency eases and we’re able to seek care, our doctors do not understand the nature of a post-viral illness that escalates with every exertion. It’s easier for them to dismiss our experience than acknowledge a foreign condition for which even their rigorous training has not prepared them.

I turn to online support groups—if not for medical advice, then for succor. Slowly, this circle of care expands, as lockdown lifts and I begin to recognize disability around me, at work and within my own family. Sometimes a disease or disorder reveals itself in shorn hair, a scar, a limp, a bruise, a bracelet bearing a number I should call in case of collapse. More often, a person’s pain, like mine, is invisible. But as others learn of my illness, they start to share their own. Almost always, there’s something in the trauma, the treatment, or the long recovery I recognize: a variation of experience I can appreciate as I listen with rapt attention to the ways lives have been exquisitely adapted to accommodate each condition.

*

The presumed origin of Darwin’s illness was also the fount of his infamous theory. Soon after he embarked on the Beagle in 1831, he began observing the myriad ways species adapted. After describing how a crab peels and attacks a coconut at its weakest point, he reflected: “I think this is as curious a case of instinct as ever I heard of, and likewise of adaptation in structure between two objects apparently so remote from each other in the scheme of nature, as a crab and a cocoa-nut tree.”

Darwin’s power lay in this capacity to juxtapose, to clasp together two mutually exclusive ideas—”a crab and a cocoa-nut tree”—long enough for their friction to create a spark on which to warm the imagination. The intricate formation of vertical miles of under-ocean coral were the graves of once-living organisms; the mountain-top fossils that so delighted Darwin they cured his altitude sickness bore evidence the ground he stood on was capable of colossal upheaval. Perhaps by holding so many opposing facts together, Darwin became someone who could accept nausea without catastrophizing, but also without denying its severity. Someone who could grasp the concept of survival of the fittest alongside his own unfitness.

“I can see no difficulty” Darwin wrote in a passage that plumbs the expansive reach of his imagination, later excised from Origin for its largely speculative properties, “in a race of bears being rendered, by natural selection, more and more aquatic in their structure and habits, with larger and larger mouths, till a creature was produced as monstrous as a whale.”

*

In 2009, Serge Kovaleski is awarded a Pulitzer Prize for “Breaking News Reporting.” During an interview with his alma mater, Kovaleski calls the honor surreal. “It doesn’t sink in right away,” he says. “It’s been an evolving process.”

For Kovaleski, that evolution included studying French philosophy at the Sorbonne. While traveling Europe he observed the fall of the Berlin Wall and felt called to journalism. After stints at the news desks of The New York Daily News and The Washington Post, Kovaleski joined the staff of The New York Times, where he covered everything from Prince’s death to the Boston Marathon bombing to Seal Team Six, reporting that earned him a George Polk Award. The son of a CIA spy and polyglot socialite, he was raised in Australia and New York. Kovaleski was born in South Africa in 1961 with arthrogryposis, a congenital joint condition that limits movement in his right arm.

Trump: “He should stop using his disability to grandstand.” Streep, who’d been accepting a Lifetime Achievement Award when defending Kovaleski, was “overrated.”

*

Friedrich Trump is walking with his first child and namesake, Fred, around their Queens neighborhood on a spring day in 1918. He’s feeling unwell. This is unlike the forty-nine-year-old German-born businessman, who immigrated to America at age sixteen and endured a grueling trek from Seattle to Whitehorse to earn his fortune operating brothels for prospectors during the Yukon Gold Rush.

Such success is no match for the Spanish flu, which has begun its grim death count that will rise to an estimated fifty million or more—a pandemic Friedrich’s grandson, as president of the United States during the next global pandemic, will appear to have forgotten.

Upon returning home from the walk with his son, Friedrich dies almost immediately, a story that will not be passed down to his descendants.

“Going forward,” Donald Trump’s estranged niece Mary would write of his father Fred’s denial of this genealogy, “he refused to acknowledge or feel loss.” During an interview, Mary traces her uncle’s aversion to illness back to her family’s culture. In the Trump household, she claims, such things were not spoken of; to be sick was “unacceptable” and “a display of unforgivable weakness.”

*

Darwin leaned against the doorframe of the Beagle’s poop cabin, where he’d set up his laboratory, looking wan. At twenty-two, his sideburns were in full bloom, but his hairline had begun to recede to reveal a broad, egg-shaped forehead; only a few wisps graced his crown. These stood at attention, while the spate of hair below was disheveled, cross-hatched with tracks his fingers combed while deep in thought. But his complexion, usually ruddy, was what struck his shipmate, John Lort Stokes: pale and ghostly.

“Old fellow,” Darwin said, clapping Stokes on the back before leaning his full weight on him so as not to stagger with the pitch of the ship, “I must take the horizontal for it.” Nudging the specimens he’d been dissecting to one side, Darwin lay supine on top of his lab table, as if he were one of the species he was studying.

The trip was not a luxury cruise; Voyage of the Beagle closes with a warning of its privations. “Our Voyage having come to an end, I will take a short retrospect of the advantages and disadvantages, the pains and pleasures, of our circumnavigation of the world,” Darwin reflected in a recapitulation characteristic of his later writings: “If a person suffers much from seasickness, let him weigh it heavily in the balance.”

During the voyage, Darwin was more than seasick. He endured insect bites, dehydration, and some Chilean wine that “half poisoned” him. Long rides across the scorching plains of Patagonia brought on fevers, but the one he suffered in Chile in 1834 kept him in bed with nausea, vomiting, and fatigue for almost two months.

His sister Catherine wrote to convey their physician father’s concern: “Papa…wishes to urge you to think of leaving the Beagle, and returning home, and to take warning by this one serious illness…do be wise in time and come away before your health is ruined; if you once lose that, you will never recover it again entirely.” The letter, written with prescience in January, did not arrive until July 1835, so that, in reading it, Darwin must have felt thrust back in time. Having by then recovered from the acute infection referred to in the letter, he stayed with the expedition until its end a little over a year later.

When he returned to England, Darwin found himself altered. In June 1842, he would make a ten-day trip through North Wales, climbing mountains to observe the effect of glaciers on valleys, as he used to when exploring the fossil-littered peaks of Patagonia. Following this trip, he was able to take only “short walks.” He was thirty-three.

*

At forty, I can no longer exercise. As symptoms improve, I inch on compression tights and attempt a short jog through my neighborhood. When I return, my stomach churns as if the sidewalk had been a sea-tossed ship, the skin over my ribs flushes pink, fog billows at the borders of my brain. Fatigue flares, sending me back to the couch, and back in time.

Three years ago, as I lay cradling my aching ribcage, I couldn’t help but identify as one of the “weak” the protestor on my screen wished to eliminate. When I look back over my illness now, I see them there, from the beginning, grasping posterboard to chest, peering over the top in tinted Air Force-style sunglasses that obscured their face, but not their sentiment. 

As I submit once again to the well-worn concave of my couch cushions, it occurs to me that the protestor was scared. They would rather do away with the weak than to acknowledge us as the same. As kin, we represent a possible and even probable—you could say inevitable—future. The damaging slogan was a shield wielded against such a vision.

Looking at it this way, I feel our positions reversed. Years into illness, I’ve begun to find value in living on the horizontal. My quieted life might be abhorrent to some, for whom the definition of “fit” is narrow. But it encompasses a new depth of experience, allowing me to accept diversity in the lives I encounter, and to better imagine those I don’t see. Our society, I’m beginning to understand, is an incomplete fossil record. There are vast swaths of hidden experience, more variations of lives lived behind closed doors and on different planes, than the protester was willing to acknowledge. And that is their loss, a failure of the imagination: the very origin of empathy.

*

“Looking backwards,” as he was wont to do, Darwin made note in his Autobiography of a dominant trait that emerged over his career: “I can now perceive how my love for science gradually preponderated over every other taste.” Retrospection allowed the naturalist to hold his present state against evidence from the past, whether a symptom recorded or a fossilized bone.

Darwin spent almost three years preparing his travel diary for publication. As he drafted, the author worked backward to draw out highlights, beginning each chapter with an index, subjects separated by dashes. The effect of these foreshortenings is stunning in the way language is juxtaposed, a journey compressed, destination heralding discovery, delight oozing between dashes, barely contained in these prose poems in which the Phosphorescence of the Sea might be followed by Port Desire.

As this kind of assiduous task became difficult, Darwin began writing about his illness. Not only did his notes provide a map for a new doctor (he consulted around eighteen, including Queen Victoria’s physician), they allowed him to discover causes for inexplicable flares, and the treatments that helped, or didn’t. Both Voyage of the Beagle and Diary of Health read as records of where Darwin had been, a way to share with others his delight, his discoveries, and his pain.

The body is a landscape not easily rendered, and, written at the presumed height of his symptoms, or in the exhausted aftermath, Darwin’s depictions of his ailments lack the acuity of his travel narrative. In the absence of an adequate lexicon, the author relied on made-up syllables like ish (as in goodish and poorish) and underlining of the word “very” with two emphatic dashes to indicate gradations of wellness. Darwin began referring to his health in terms of these mute lines, calling a good day a “double-dash day” and counting the number of dashes as a signal of overall health: “19 double-dashes,” he wrote with a degree of triumph in December 1851, “Best since Jan 1850” (when he scored 24).

The impact of the symptom list may be less uplifting than its precursor, but, in its compactness, it’s just as forceful, relaying the barrage of experiences his body faced. The indices of Voyage and the Diary function similarly, drawing salient points from the muddle of lived experience, be it travel or illness. Both, for Darwin, broke into life with the fresh perspective of defamiliarization. Whether he wished to call out the “Habits of an Oven-bird” or “fits of flatulence,” these list-like songs are the charts he left for us to follow.

*

A seven-year-old Darwin kneels as if proposing to his younger sister Catherine, hands clasped about a brick-red planter balanced on raised knee. As painted by Ellen Sharples (circa 1816), the child is dressed in white stockings, dark navy breeches, and matching jacket. Above a lacy collar, his clear, pigeon-blue eyes betray none of the wonders they will behold. Darwin’s fine brown hair, though cut close, covers his brow, locks curving in front of a delicate ear as if in anticipation of the robust sideburns that will grace those rosy cheeks, so pink in the painting they seem brushed by the red tips of the golden flowers sprouting from the pot in the child’s arms.

“I used to like to hear him admire the beauty of a flower,” his son Frank would recall. “It was a kind of gratitude to the flower itself, and a personal love for its delicate form and color.” When his health was bad, so as to preclude even writing, Darwin worked on plants. Like barnacles, this area of study seemed to keep him in better health than other scientific work.

The plants in the painting—Catherine holds a posy tied with blue ribbon and a basket of opalescent blossoms sits at the children’s feet—were likely grown in the Shropshire garden of Darwin’s youth. The Mount—his family’s home in Shrewsbury—was a place he’d remember fondly in letters from the Beagle. “I often think of the Garden at home as a Paradise”; Darwin wrote wistfully to Caroline from Buenos Aires. “On a fine summer’s evening, when the birds are singing how I should enjoy to appear, like a Ghost amongst you, whilst working with the flowers.”

From that remembered utopia, Darwin’s awe of the natural world grew, inclusive of its varieties: “We see these beautiful co-adaptations,” he wrote in Origin, “plainly in the humblest parasite which clings to the hairs of a quadruped or feather of a bird; in the structure of the beetle which dives through the water; in the plumed seed which is wafted by the gentlest breeze.”

Like the species he observed, Darwin adapted. He accommodated illness in ways that allowed him to produce a body of knowledge that would change the course of humankind. Simply by charting what our course has been. Employing an imagination that could see a whale in a bear, that could, brick by weightless brick, build castles in the sky, Darwin was able to hold the past against the present and acknowledge both the delight and dread of the natural world. He recognized the strength of humankind alongside our vulnerability, and accepted his own inexorable demise. 

If you could embrace that: you were invincible. 

---

Jodie Noel Vinson holds an MFA in nonfiction creative writing from Emerson College. Her essays have been published in The New York Times, Harvard Review, Ploughshares, Literary Hub, and AGNI, among other places. She is the recipient of the Arts & Letters Susan Atefat Prize for Creative Nonfiction, the Ninth Letter Literary Award in Creative Nonfiction and the Maureen Egen Writers Exchange Award from Poets & Writers. She lives in Providence, Rhode Island, where she is writing a book about the intersections of chronic illness and creative expression.

An Interview with Jodie Noel Vinson conducted by Clare Hickey

Clare Hickey

What was the moment you knew that Charles Darwin needed to be a part of this story? Were you familiar with him at all before?

Jodie Noel Vinson
I love that you ask about the origins of this essay because I feel like it really became an exploration of origins. The essay really started with me in the early pandemic. Looking at this protester who was holding their sign “sacrifice the weak” and realizing I was one of the weak, maybe that they wanted to do away with and thinking, Okay, How did we get here? You know, and then looking backwards and reflecting and Darwin’s story came into that. To help me explore that question in my own life.

I really knew very little about Darwin’s life when I started the essay. He had been just this kind of iconic, almost stereotypical, even cartoonish, figure in my mind. And one thing I’ve learned in writing and researching, looking at the lives of folks through the lens of illness, is that it kind of opens up their humaneness and their vulnerabilities. It was really rewarding to learn about him in a more nuanced way. I think it was just really learning about the fact that someone who had studied and talked about and thought about survival of the fittest might himself be unfit. That kind of was the spark for the essay.

CH
What did your research process look like? Is there like a particular book that helped you a lot?

JNV
“I think I actually started with reading Voyage of the Beagle. It was a book I had on my shelf that I’d never read, and I was just so compelled by that travel narrative. Darwin’s just such a wonderful writer, such a curious person, and he really came alive for me as a character by reading that book. But at the same time I was reading a book that came out in the Seventies about his illness by Ralph Colp called To Be An Invalid. He was drawing on Darwin’s Diary of Health and a lot of his correspondence. It was interesting to see parallels between the way that Darwin was describing the world around him and the way he tried to describe his health. I think also what was really helpful in researching the essays—a lot of his correspondence has been digitalized and made available on the Internet. So it was actually quite easy to then trace something like a letter that I was interested in to the source.”

CH
You’ve written several stories about long COVID? How has the reception been? Has it been what you’ve hoped for?

JNV
“I started writing almost immediately after falling ill in in early March 2020. Both my husband and I got sick and didn’t get better and, you know, at the time there was very little being written about this kind of prolonged experience. It was new for a lot of us and so I think what compelled me to write back then was really the sense of kind of like urgency and emergency. It was really a cry for help and recognition and advocacy, and there was so much denial at the time about COVID in general. But also its prolonged symptoms. So at the time my motivation was a little bit different.”

“The response in general was really wonderful. It connected me to other people who are experiencing similar things, or who had in the past, and that was true of readers, but also about the lives of people I was researching too. So it connected me in that time of isolation. Five years in now to the pandemic, things have changed a lot, so I’m writing now, maybe less for that recognition and more to reflect and explore the experience itself. With the sheer number of people who have experienced long COVID, there’s so much more recognition of it and much less, hopefully, gaslighting. It’s still important to talk about it. People will accept it more as a reality, but it isn’t in our consciousness as much or in the media as much. That’s kind of the difficulty with chronic illness. It’s ongoing so we don’t engage with it.”

CH
Yeah, I think it’s an inconvenient truth. That’s a a theme, I think of the story of the truth is often inconvenient, and Darwin’s views challenge religion. Long COVID challenges our perceptions of what we hope a pandemic ends up being is brief. Why do you think we are so afraid of being challenged?

JNV
“I think his theory really required people to accept something maybe very similar to what the pandemic forced us to look at: an uncomfortable truth about human life, about our vulnerability, about our mortality. And it seems like we—at least I can speak for myself—especially in American culture, we have this defense mechanism that makes us want to look away from those uncomfortable or inconvenient truths. I wanted this essay to kind of challenge or break through that, because there is a reward when we don’t look away. There’s beauty and life when we don’t put those defenses up.”

CH
Towards the end of the essay, you say “there are vast swaths of hidden experience, more variations of lives left behind closed doors and on different planes.” Is there one of these lives you’ve interacted with that’s really struck you?

JNV
“Yeah, there have been a lot. When I fell ill it was like a whole layer of life was revealed to me, almost like putting on a new pair of glasses. People came out of the wood. A family member reached out who had been living with a chronic condition, undiagnosed for years. That person sent care packages and checked in and just had this depth of understanding that I hadn’t necessarily accessed or appreciated before. I became aware of this layer of life, the kind of invisible pain that a lot of people live with. These folks were the ones who were able to extend care and empathy and who knew how to hold up under the disbelief of others.”

“It was also the authors and artists that I began to research and study. I was reading contemporary writers like Susanna Clarke or Laura Hillenbrand. I was reading Seabiscuit and I was like, wow, this attention to detail, and then I found out Hillenbrand was bedridden for years. I began to realize that there was a tie between creativity and artistic vision and of the sensitivity and heightened observation that can develop when someone is challenged in certain ways. It was recognizing this kind of strength and resilience in the lives of people who had suffered in similar ways—the kind of creativity that could come out of an illness experience as well.”

CH

 Your essay is such a beautifully written acceptance of vulnerability and weakness as a natural thing, and a calling to recognize the value of humankind alongside our vulnerability. Through Trump, you demonstrate that aversion to this is a learned trait. Do you think that this aversion is reversible?

JNV
“I don’t know if it’s reversible in Trump’s case because he has a lot invested in this viewpoint. And to be clear, he’s twisted these theories to his own political ends. It’s social Darwinism, as I say in the essay, that Herbert Spencer put forth, not Darwin’s theory, that I feel like is the lens that I’m looking at Trump through. So I think as long as these viewpoints are keeping him in power, it may be difficult for him to reverse. However, for the rest of us, it’s not easy either.”

“I don’t think it’s a matter of flipping a switch and reversing our thinking. The illness experience that I’ve gone through gave me a lot of insight, and further reading and research strengthened this recognition. But, it’s an ongoing challenge for me to hold that perspective, especially on a good day or when I’m feeling better. I want to remember the value and the richness of this experience on this side of life, and I don’t want to turn from the suffering of others. But that isn’t an easy way to live, right? I think I still have an impulse when someone tells me they’re ill to maybe doubt or disbelieve. I want to be able to recognize that defense mechanism and be better at kind of living with these hard truths because if I can learn to accept it in my own life, then I’ll have more of a capacity to accept and learn from and enjoy a fuller range of other lives, but it’s definitely an evolving process.”