In this event report, our newsletter editor Frances Lloyd recaps the talk by Professor Colin Kelcey, FRS, FRSS, FLS, MRI, about the intriguing and remarkable life of Erasmus Darwin.
Erasmus Darwin was the grandfather of Charles Darwin. Colin showed us a picture of him by the painter Joseph Wright of Derby. Erasmus was a ‘porky’ man who lived from 1731 to1802. He lived at a time when there was lots going on politically and socially. He was one of the key thinkers of the Midlands Enlightenment.
Early life
Erasmus was born on 12th December 1731 at Elston Hall in Nottinghamshire. He was the youngest of seven children. His father Robert was a retired physician and lawyer. Erasmus was educated at Chesterfield Grammar School and St. Johns College Cambridge. From there, he went to Edinburgh Medical School, which was one of the best in Europe.
Erasmus the doctor
Between 1757 and 1782 Erasmus practised medicine in Litchfield. He was very popular having treated a young man who others had said was terminally ill. The treatment Erasmus gave him resulted in him having a long life. His practice was at the house where Erasmus lived and he had an open door policy meaning people were charged only what they could afford. He was one of the most renowned and successful doctors of his day and didn’t believe in quackery. His medical skills were rated by many and he travelled great distances to see patients. He had an excellent bedside manner. He emphasised exercise, good diet and no alcohol. He gave up alcohol after a bout of gout. King George III offered him the post of Royal Physician but Erasmus declined. He produced Zoonomia, a great medical and scientific work. It was said to do the same for medicine as Sir Isaac Newton’s Principia has done for Natural Philosophy.
Litchfield
Litchfield was a city of philosophers (e.g. Dr. Samuel Johnson) and during that time philosophy flourished in Litchfield. The city was a centre of coaching hubs with coaching inns, theatre, a racecourse and assembly rooms. The cathedral was an intellectual powerhouse and a source of gossip, scandal and intrigue.
Erasmus the polymath
Erasmus was a renaissance man and a polymath. He was an inventor (significant though he wanted to keep that quiet), a meteorologist (he developed a model of atmosphere which wasn’t superseded until the 1950s), an innovator, a wordsmith, a promoter of other people (in their careers or whatever they were interested in), a poet (one of the foremost poets of the 1770s) and a bon viveur (loud parties and chats). He came up with ideas that wouldn’t be put into practice till centuries later. He put his ideas in a ‘commonplace book’. Erasmus was a friend of Josiah Wedgwood and they shared an interest in the Trent and Mersey canal. During the excavations, Wedgwood found fossilised bones and this is linked to Erasmus’s interest in evolution and also made him think about extinction (thinking which didn’t exist at the time). The idea of extinction was pursued by Georges Cuvier and it was then accepted.
His personal life
Erasmus was married twice. Firstly to Mary Howard, a solicitor’s daughter. She died fairly young in 1770 from sclerosis of the liver. In 1781 he married Elizabeth Pole. He had fourteen children in total, two from an affair with Mary Parker. He made sure these two were part of the family educating them and leaving money for them when he died. It is also thought he had another daughter from an affair with Lucy Swift. He was the grandfather of Charles Darwin and Francis Galton. Galton was a polymath, the father of eugenics and he advanced the field of statistics. He was also the father of fingerprinting, identikit pictures and weather maps.
Other interesting facts about Erasmus ‘the everything man’
Erasmus brought together people, ideas and disciplines. He founded learned societies and communicated his knowledge to the wider world. He had a literary flair but was rather shy about publishing and often did it anonymously. He was in the top third of the providers of new words. In the poem Temple of Nature he speculates as to the origin of language. Some of the words he invented were refreeze, blushing, aerial, alleviation, tonsillitis and the first person to use the word ‘bottom’. In botany he came up with sap wood and milk parsley. He had a particular interest in coach design and came up with a new design in his ‘commonplace book’ which was much more stable (he had been seriously injured when young when a coach overturned).
He had his own ideas about evolution and how changes occur through natural selection and the survival of the fittest. With his belief that life springs from living filament he adopted the family motto ‘Everything from Shells’. In botany, he set up the Lichfield Botanical Society as a front for his publications on botany. He was a progressive thinker and believed that women shouldn’t be shielded from things like sex. He was the first person to use the word ‘sexual’ and to properly refer to photosynthesis. He used plain English not Latin. He consulted Samuel Johnson to ensure he had the vocabulary correct.
Erasmus was the chief organiser of the Lunar Society, which consisted of scientists and industrialists. They met at full moon. It included James Watt, Josiah Wedgwood, Joseph Priestley, William Small and Matthew Boulton.
He and Wedgwood were related by marriage. The horizontal windmill was invented by Erasmus to power Wedgwood’s machinery. He was also interested in electrical research being conducted by the scientific community and coined the word ‘electrical’. Another interest was cosmology and he designed a multi-mirrored telescope but it was not properly constructed until the 1970s. He recognised that hydrogen is a highly combustible gas. He invented a speech machine. He often passed his ideas onto others because he didn’t want to be known as the ‘mad inventor’.
Erasmus’s scientific writing and poetry made a profound impression on The Romantics and on Wordsworth and Coleridge. Coleridge said: ‘The everything man possesses greater knowledge than any other man in Europe’. Erasmus was keenly interested in educating people, particularly women. He inspired Mary Shelley to write Frankenstein. He designed a bird and was very interested in flight. He had a lot of female friends, including Anna Seward and Maria Jacson.
Why not more famous?
For all his talents, he went from famous to forgotten and was almost forgotten by 1800. He upset politicians and the Church. He supported causes such as the French and US revolutions, banning slavery, votes for women, etc. William Pitt hated anything revolutionary and tried to clamp down on anyone supporting such actions. George Canning PM hated and feared anyone connected to the French Revolution. Canning had considerable influence as editor of the Weekly Examiner. Erasmus’s reputation suffered terribly. He died in 1802 in Breadsall, Derby.
Colin ended his talk by saying that Erasmus’s view on retirement was ‘Retirement is a dangerous experience and generally ends either in drunkenness or hypochondriasis’!