REVIEW

A RENAISSANCE ENLIGHTENMENT MAN

C. U. M. Smith and Robert Arnott (eds), The Genius ofErasmus Darwin. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005. Pp. xvii + 416.

£60.00 HB.

By Ashton Nichols

The word ‘polymath� does not do justice to Erasmus Darwin. Thetitles of two recent books about him include the term ‘genius� andthe phrase ‘a life of unequalled achievement�. Not bad for a portlycountry doctor with a pronounced stutter and a bad limp who be-lieved in spontaneous generation and who, according to his grand-son, Charles, had no direct influence on the latter�s theory ofevolution. But Charles Darwin must have been forgetful or afraidto admit his influences. Erasmus Darwin actually developed a uni-fied theory of organic evolution by 1803 when he published TheTemple of Nature. In fact, Erasmus even anticipated his grandson�scentral original contribution, the idea of sexual (natural) selectionthrough acquired characteristics. Ideas about evolution, however,were just a small part of the elder Darwin�s contribution to 18th-and 19th-century thinking. Not only was he a founder of the LunarSociety, one of the most significant gatherings of thinkers anddoers of the era, Erasmus Darwin also originated and promulgatedmany of the central ideas that made the Industrial Revolutionpossible.

This commemorative volume, part of the Science, Technologyand Culture, 1700–1945 series published by Ashgate, was developedout of a conference celebrating the bicentennial of Darwin�s death.The book serves as an excellent starting place for anyone interestedin the remarkable range of Darwin�s interests and achievements –from medicine to education, technology to literature, biology toenvironmentalism – and will also be a valuable resource for more

Metascience (2006) 15: 385–388 � Springer 2006DOI 10.1007/s11016-006-9021-5

advanced students and scholars of Darwin�s work. It is difficult toindicate the range and effectiveness of the two dozen essays in sucha volume in a short review, so instead I will indicate a number ofthe high spots and suggest ways that this book may be useful todifferent sorts of readers.

Desmond King-Hele, dean of biographical studies of Darwin,offers a valuable prologue to the complete collection of essays in-cluded here as well as a thoughtful essay on Darwin�s inventions.These total at least 45, most of which were never produced, butwhich include steering devices for carriages that later proved effec-tive on motorcars, a better oil lamp, and the horizontal windmill.In addition, King-Hele has also produced a third essay for this col-lection on Darwin as the ‘Air Man�, an intrepid experimental re-searcher who was the first person in England to fly a hydrogenballoon, the introducer of the word ‘oxygen� into the language, andthe developer of crucial observations about the laws that controlgases. This ‘atmospheric� Darwin was also a master of meteorologyand one of the anticipators of a future of human air travel: ‘‘Soonshall thy arm UNCONQUER�D STEAM!...on wide waving wingsexpanded bear/The flying-chariot through the fields of air’’ (‘‘TheEconomy of Vegetation’’, I: 289, 91–92).

Denis Gibbs and G. C. Cook add valuable essays on doctoringin 18th-century Litchfield and England, while discussing Darwin�srole as a physician – his first and foremost career. He treated up to4,000 patients and travelled roughly 10,000 miles a years during histime spent actively doctoring. He was a superb general practitionerand diagnostician, although his cures, as Jenny Uglow has noted,often included ‘‘standard remedies or placebos, laced with generoushelpings of opium’’ (p. 48). He gave much of his medical expertiseaway for free to poor patients, and he was likewise well-known forhis sympathetic treatment of all sufferers, including the mentallyand emotionally ill, at a time when such sympathy was not a nor-mal part of doctoring.

Uglow, author of the wonderful Lunar Men: The Friends WhoMade the Future, offers here a valuable survey of the attitudes ofmembers of The Lunar Society toward the education of theirdaughters and of women in general. Darwin�s contributions towomen�s rights are just one of the areas of his influence overlookedor underrated by subsequent historians. Raffaella Simili, from thedepartment of philosophy at University of Bologna, links Darwin�s

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speculations about the origins of life and human reproductivebiology to the work of Luigi Galvani, the Italian scientist whosetwitching frog-legs helped found the science of galvanism andinspired Doctor Frankenstein�s electrified monster. Simili�s essayreminds us of the extent to which doctors in this era were oftenexperimental researchers as well as speculative thinkers who triedto make sense of the mysteries of reproductive biology, terminalillnesses, and the origins of life.

Less well-known perhaps, but equally interesting, are ideas of-fered in essays on Darwin�s role as an originator of speech science,the understanding of how human voices make sounds that becomerecognisable language, as well as machines that can reproduce hu-man voices, and his role in the origins of photography, especiallythrough the work of Tom Wedgwood, a less well-known memberof the pottery family. One of the editors of the collection, C. U. M.Smith adds a fascinating reflection on Darwin�s evolutionary psy-chobiology, a forerunner of current understanding of the mind–brain. Cognitive neurobiologists are at work in laboratories today,trying to establish the same materialist connections between mole-cules, cells, and thought that Darwin anticipated in his reflectionson neural fibres, the sensorium, and David Hartley�s virbratiuncles.

Both editors note that Darwin was ‘‘one of the only poets totake science as his subject matter’’ (p. 305) and, although this state-ment may be technically true, Darwin�s interest in poetic descrip-tions of science has had a direct influence, or an indirect influence,on scientifically inclined poets ranging from Blake, Shelley, andKeats to more recent practitioners like Wallace Stevens, HowardNemerov, and Mary Oliver. Martin Priestman, author of RomanticAtheism: Poetry and Freethought, 1780–1830, offers an excellentessay on the early drafts of Darwin�s Temple of Nature, the workwhich, more than any other, synthesised Darwin�s expansivethoughts into a unified picture of the natural world. Darwin�s pur-pose in this remarkable poem, and its equally remarkable prosenotes, was not merely to replace ‘‘the Garden of Eden story withan alternative scenario which explodes the whole myth of creationand sinful knowledge’’ (p. 319) but also to ‘‘account for the originof all life on the planet’’ as well as ‘‘the growth and character ofhuman nature from the beginning of time to the present’’ (p. 307).Of course, Darwin�s view that knowledge, by itself, could never bea source of ‘sin� is the presupposition that underlies all science

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since the Enlightenment. Nor, as Darwin clearly understood, couldreligious belief ever underpin the material truths of the universe.When the cure to cancer or AIDS is finally announced, it will notmatter whether the discoverer is a Buddhist, a Hindu, a Christian,or an atheist. The effective cure will still be the cure.

Darwin�s expansive ideas thus influenced human activities fromwomen�s education (A Plan for the Conduct of Female Education inBoarding Schools, 1797) to science fiction (Frankenstein, 1818: seeMary Shelley�s introduction). He developed one of the first ma-chines that could make accurate copies of written documents, andhe designed a telescope with multiple mirrors that was finally con-structed in 1979. He described a hydrogen-burning engine, like onethat may turn out to be the salvation of our own petrol-starved21st century. In conclusion, it is worth noting that Darwin fathereda total of 14 children: 12 with two legal wives and two as the resultof his liaison with a young woman who had come to help him carefor his first five children after the early death of his first wife. Fewhumans have accomplished as much in seven decades as the garru-lous doctor from Lichfield.

The addition of a 26 page bibliography and a thorough andaccurate index will make this volume useful to scholars and lay-readers alike. Readers should study this book from cover to coverand carefully consider the range of topics discussed. Then they maycome to agree that Erasmus Darwin will someday earn the titleproposed the editors of this volume; the grandfather of CharlesDarwin is, without doubt, the Leonardo da Vinci of the English-speaking world.

Department of EnglishDickinson CollegeCarlisle, PAUSA

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