Thinking Sideways: Charles Darwin's Health

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Thinking Sideways. I don't stories of things we simply don't
know the answer too. Hello everybody, and welcome again to
another episode of Thinking Sideways, this podcast where I talk

(00:27):
in a weird monotone voice. Not really, Hey everybody, This
is Steve and as always I am joined by Devin
and Joe and once again we have another mystery to
bring to you. Yeah. Really, it's not all cats on
the internet. We know there's there's something else on the internet.

(00:49):
I'm only talking about the cats. Okay, Well, this week
we're we're going to talk about a man who is
revered as the father of the theory of natural selection,
which be Charles Darwin. And I know that you're asking yourself, well,
what's the mystery about Darwin? Well, it's it's a simple
and a complex one. Yeah, who is the detective on

(01:15):
murder of the Orient Express? Maybe it was, well, obviously
somebody will tell us, doesn't matter. Yeah. Anyways, he always
talked about the simple answer and the complex answer. Right, true,
So we're channeling him today, yes, were we right? No?

(01:37):
Not really? As I said, the mystery is Darwin's health,
and unfortunately there's no treap of cover angle here for
most of Darwin's life. He was plagued with health problems
which medical science both then and now really can't figure out.

(01:57):
And in fairness, with the kind of testing we could
do now, maybe we could. But that's absolutely true with
the technology at the time to go allow that. Yeah,
and but it's it's amazing. Until we tackled this, this mystery,
I was not aware that so many people have been
researching and hypothesizing about Darwin's condition. Darwin Darwin is a

(02:19):
very popular topic for a myriad of reasons, so it
doesn't surprise me, and I'm actually quite happy that there's
so much research out there. But let's let's get back
to Darwin here. I've got to briefly talk about Darwin. Obviously,
we can't just dive into things. We've got to talk
about him a little bit before we do that. Though,

(02:39):
I do want to thank Alyssa, who suggested this story
to us on Facebook quite a while back. And I
also want to send out a huge thank you to
all of our experts who helped with this story. It
wouldn't be nearly what it is without those folks. I
don't think it would be an episode without those Oh no, no,
I probably would have given up on this like a

(02:59):
week and a half ago, would have been making a
fool of ourselves or fools of ourselves. Say yeah, the
only thing I'm gonna probably get wrong at this point
is pronunciations. So let's talk about Darwin. Most people know
Charles Darwin usually from one of two things. It's either
On the Origin of Species, which is his book that

(03:20):
he wrote about his theory of natural selection, or it's
the Galapagos Islands, which he visited when he was on
the HMS Beagle, or or both of those things. Well,
it's typically people know one or two primarily, but it
can be both. Here absolutely right, there's so much more
to him, and there's so much more than just the

(03:41):
galop Ghost and so many things that that formed his theories.
He's really really interesting. I've been reading his Beagle diaries,
I've been reading his correspondence. Um, I've done a bunch
of research on Darwin and he's incredibly, incredibly an interest
interesting character and for anybody who's interested, I recommend going

(04:05):
and reading his stuff. You won't be sorry for it.
And I'll probably make that that statement again, but it
is just I was really happy to get to do it.
The only downside was the one thing I wanted to
return out to be a fourteen volume set that I
couldn't check out the whole library. Weird. I didn't have
the time to sit there and read it all. What

(04:27):
was what was the fourteen volume set? It was fourteen
volumes of Darwin's writings, letters and all that letters and
stuff like that and stuff about him. Yeah, it was
looked amazingly interesting, but unfortunately I couldn't sit in the
basement library for three days and read it. People do
that all the time. I don't know what your problem is.

(04:47):
I got that whole work thing whatever. This podcast is
more important than that. You're right, You're right. I do
have one funny little personal observation from reading a bunch
of dar and stuff is he was a bit of
a complainer. I was reading his diary from the Beagle

(05:07):
and then some of his letters, and it was funny,
you know, he complained about a lot of things. And
maybe that's just because he was stuck on a ship
for five years straight and had nothing else to do.
But it was just it struck me as something that
I would have never suspected. It was very sick on
a ship we're gonna talk about that in a minute,
I'm pretty sure, and to be fair, I've been complaining

(05:30):
about the weather all day, So all right, let's get
into a little of the biography of Darwin here. Charles
Robert Darwin was born on the twelfth of February eighteen
o nine in Shrewsbury, England. He's the fifth of six
children of Dr Robert Darwin and Susannah Darwin last night, Yes,

(05:55):
because they were married Joe. Though he would eventually come
up with his own theories in the world and religion.
Darwin was raised Unitarian. When he was only eight years old,
his mother died and she had been exhibiting signs of
intestinal issues. Some people think that maybe it was stomach cancer,

(06:16):
and also we don't know. Not surprisingly that the death
of his mother is seen as a major event in
his life though. Yeah, But but to what degree that
influenced him is debated. I've seen a lot of debate
about what that did to him later in life. His father,

(06:38):
Dr Robert Darwin was a doctor and a medical doctor,
and he decided that his son should follow in his
footsteps and become a doctor, and he he sent him
to university's senting to the University of Edinburgh Medical School,
in though it became apparent pretty quick that Darwin couldn't

(06:59):
cut it as a doctor. Didn't even really see joke
in there. The problem was is that he well, he
considered the lectures boring and the sight of blood made
him sick. Yeah, that's that's really weird. I mean, I'm
not putting people down if blood blood makes you. Oh no, no,
not at all. But I mean looking at looking at
blood actually doesn't bother me in the least. What bothers

(07:22):
me and why I'm not a doctor or search everything's
looking at things like intestines because things that are under
the skin. Yeah, that's that stuff grosses me out. Blood's fine,
None of that grosses me out at all. So well
you're lucky, then, yeah, we lucky. Maybe we'll need let's
say about Darwin, obviously, he sort of slacked off with

(07:43):
his studies. Luckily for us, he took an interest in
what at the time was called the natural histories, and
while he was at university he was in a student
group that did that studying in the field, and he
really really quite enjoyed it. His father, on the other hand,
wasn't too amused. He decided Dr Robert Darter when that

(08:08):
is that if his if his son couldn't be a doctor,
then he should be a parson, which is a priest. Yeah,
they don't have priests in the Unitarianism, do they. I
don't believe that's I believe that's why it's a parson.
It's and And the thing about his father is, I've
read conflicting accounts that either because he seemed to have

(08:31):
a lot of control over Charles Darwin's life, at least
as a young man, was that he was either a
very stern but caring parent, or he was a bit
of a tyrant. I don't know which. But he decided
that since Darwin could not be a doctor, that he
would send him to a different school, and he sent
him to Cambridge. While he was there, they didn't really

(08:52):
enjoy the studies to be a priest either or a parson,
so he continued to start study natural histories and it
was while he was there that he published several papers
on the natural histories and met quite a few people
who saw the world in the ways that he was
developing to see it. Those papers that Darwin wrote kind

(09:16):
of helped pave the way for him to be selected
as the naturalist aboard the h M. S. Beagle, which
we touched on briefly before. The Beagle was captained by
a man named Robert fitz Roy, and fitz Roy was
planning to take the Beagle out for a second voyage.
The first voyage of the Beagle, which lasted from eighteen

(09:39):
to eighteen thirty, had surveyed Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego.
Fitz Roy wasn't initially the captain of the Beagle, but
through a series of events he became the captain and
he managed to secure funding for a second voyage to
do more surveys of the world. And one of the

(10:00):
of things that he wanted is he he knew he
needed a geologist and he kind of wanted a naturalist,
but he also it seemed like kind of wanted somebody
else to talk to, because it turns out being the
captain of the ship can be a bit lonely, which
you know, that worked out for him because fitz Roy
reached out to a number of people that he knew
trying to find someone, and the second person that was

(10:22):
suggested to him was a young Charles Darwin. He did
select Darwin, and Darwin got to go on what ended
up being a five year voyage. I want people to understand, however,
that it wasn't as if he just got to take
this trip for free. He had to pay for his
own way, So he was constantly writing to his family

(10:44):
for his father, primarily for money, and he also needed
to to pay for his room and board and food.
Couldn't he just like wash dishes or something like that.
I don't think that would have cut it. The other
thing is it wasn't as if he got some giant
palatial stateroom on the ship. He was in the map

(11:07):
room or the chart room. Excuse me. That would be
a room that was nine ft by eleven ft wide,
about five ft high, and it had both the Mizzen
mask running through it and a chart table in the
middle which was four ft by six ft. It sounds
like my accommodations when I worked on a ship. Yeah,
actually sounds like a couple of apartments I've had. Yeah,

(11:28):
nine by eleven actually, by by ship standards, especially old
old time ships like that, It's actually pretty spacious, except
for the fact there was that giant table in the middle. Yeah,
you know, that sort of ate up a bunch of room,
or also maybe the fact that other people probably needed
access to said chart. That's the problem. Yeah, it's not
exactly a private room, and they roll you off. The

(11:51):
one thing that I saw that was probably the giant
luxury is there was a bathroom in there and had
its own bathroom. That's for him. Yes, So that we're
probably worked out for well. For Darwin, knowing how well
he traveled by sea, you kind of needed a toilet nearby.
So the Beagle did go set off on its second voyage,

(12:14):
and that voyage, which again I said, had lasted for
five years, traveled southwest from England. It traveled to South America,
then down around the southern tip of South America, eventually
making its way to the Galapagos and Australia. South America
or South Africa. I'm just gonna put another South America there,
which there is, because it went from South Africa to

(12:35):
South America both before then returning home to England. So
I quite a long voyage, that is, I didn't I'm
kind of surprised that they were. They were at South
Africa where they didn't didn't just sail up north in
the Atlantic. Maybe they didn't want to do the Horn.
Maybe that seemed even more dangerous. No, they had to
go around the Horn. They did Africa, Yeah, because they
went underneath, went up, and then across to South America again.

(13:00):
So they literally did a full navigation of the globe
before heading north again. And there's there's a number of reasons.
There was a bunch of stuff they were looking at
and trying to figure out. But that's the route that
they took. Whatever um as. As much as I'd like
to go into details on that trip, I can't. We

(13:21):
just don't have the time. That would be a show
that would be hours and hours and hours long, and
it would be well worth it. But that's not our
focus today, and we don't consider it an unsolved mystery.
I do want I do want people to understand, though
I I didn't really know this as a kid when
I was growing up and learning about Darwin. Is It's

(13:42):
not as if he went on this voyage and then
immediately turned around and penned his theories of natural selection. Yeah,
he saw one what finch right well, and then he
was like, oh, I get it now, that's not how
that happened. No, that's not that happened. Yeah, it was
actually sitting under an Apple film. That's no. No, he

(14:04):
it took Darwin. He didn't publish On the Origin of
Species till twenty years after. It took him eight years
to write the book, but he didn't publish it till
twenty years later. So it's not as if it was
an immediate turnaround like we were saying. Yeah, although there
are probably a lot of political reasons that he wouldn't
have released it even after eight years. There there is

(14:26):
a lot of political or religious reasons, and there's a
lot of good stuff out there about that that goes
into you know, his conflict with religion and his wife
was very religious and his struggles with that. There's a
lot of great content about that. On the Origin of
Species was not the only thing that Darwin wrote. He

(14:46):
he wrote goads of papers and books. I mean, the
guy really was prolific, and he made a lot of
very systematic observations of the world and put it all
into writing. What was he capable of sketching? Did the
sketch animals that he saw? There are sketches, but I
you know, to be honest, I never looked to see

(15:07):
if the sketches were attributed directly to Darwin. I imagine
there are some, but a lot of the stuff that
I find wasn't direct darwin books. That would be more
a little kind of a compilation. The stuff I saw was,
you know, it was all his writings. I was reading
the Beagle Journals, but it didn't have many illustrations. But

(15:28):
there were some illustrations, and he he did some of them,
but I don't know how much of it he actually
did him. I think he did a lot of them. Well,
I'm sure he had to. But to what degree those
are published in his work, I'm not sure, because he
worked with some other people on some of this stuff,
and I honestly I'm not sure. Yeah, he would have
had to have drawn when he was, you know, on

(15:49):
the Glop Ghost. It's not as though he had an
illustrator with him correct, so he would have had to
draw the observations. And to the degree that they were
different subtleties which is what he observed, they would have
to be detailed enough to describe that, I think, and
and it may have well be that, you know, later
on he had somebody do a better job of it.
He could within his capabilities. The sad part, as I'm

(16:12):
sure you all know, is at this point we have
to talk about the fact that eventually Charles Darwin did die.
What he's human, Yeah, he is a human mortality. On April.
On April nineteenth of eighteen eighty two, sadly, Charles Darwin
did pass away. He was seventy three years old. He
died of heart failure at his home down House. He

(16:36):
was with his family. His wife Emma was there, his
daughter Henrietta, who was his fourth child, and his son Francis,
who was his seventh child, were there with him. It
wasn't originally the plan, but Darwin did end up being
buried at Westminster Abbey. So he is near who is it.
It's Isaac Newton, so a guy who an apple fell

(16:59):
on his head, yes, and John Herschel. So he's near
some some very very influential people. That obviously is a
rather brief overview of Darwin himself. As I said before,
please go out and do more reading on him. You
will not be sorry for it. But we do need
to go to our topic at this point, which is

(17:21):
his health. Darwin suffered a huge range of symptoms through
his entire life. One of the things that everybody knows
and we've talked about a little bit is his sea sickness.
But that wasn't the only thing that he suffered. I mean,
while he was on the Beagle, he was extremely ill
and he was nearly capacitated every time he went to

(17:43):
see but he it wasn't as if he was at
sea for the entire five years. The ship was actually
at sea for a total of eighteen months. The rest
of the time they were he was online, you know,
they were at places, they were doing and stuff. Yeah,
they'd spent a month or so in in location. Sometimes

(18:03):
it's a day or two, but a lot of time
they'd spend weeks or months at places, so he didn't
have to be on the boat the whole time, luckily
for him. Yeah, that seasickness or motion sickness did follow
him for the rest of his life. When he was
an older man, he actually wouldn't write in carriages because
the motion of the carriage made him ill, so he
refused to take a carriage. He'd walk or ride a horse.

(18:26):
So he invented the precursior to car sickness. I don't
know if he invented it, but he certainly suffered from it.
So let's go through the list of things that Darwin
wrote about reported suffered from if you're a hypochondriac, Just like,
fast forward through this part because I read it and
I was like, I don't want to do this episode

(18:47):
anymore because I think I'm going to have all of
the things that we talk about not I kept self
fanalyzing as I was going through this list. Okay, well,
let's start at the top. Were already talked out the
vomiting and faintness of the side of blood, which isn't
necessarily a physical illness. Yeah, I would say it's maybe

(19:08):
not a symptom. But here is the actual list of symptoms. Vomiting,
memory loss, malaise which is generally feeling sick, tiredness, skin
problems as in exama and blisters, vertigo, loss of consciousness, cramps, indigestion,
and gas. I love this. He described it as making airs. Technically,

(19:29):
what he's doing, he is let's see, we've got dizziness, headaches, fainting, hysteria,
and fits of crying. He's got a rapid heartbeat and
heart palpitations, cachycardia, yep insomnia, vision problems, muscle spasms, memory loss, depression,

(19:51):
feelings of impending death. I think I said memory loss twice.
It must be losing memory. Could you imagine going to
your doctor with this list? Yeah, I mean no, I'm
sure he did go to his doctor with this list. Yeah,
I mean this as a whole. I mean sure, with
like little bits and pieces. But could you mention taking

(20:13):
that as one giant list? Wasn't and wasn't in terms
of memory loss? Wasn't some of it more like lost time? Yeah?
Wasn't that some of it as well? So that but
he didn't have he did have times where he was
like short bouts of it. Wasn't quite dementia, but yeah,

(20:35):
kind of kind of almost amnesia about sure, But he
also did lose time, right, that was on all thing. Okay,
I just wanted to clarify because I had heard that
in the list, so I wanted to make sure or
not in the list, but in the research. So I
just wanted to add it to list. Sorry, Yeah, it's
important for my theories, Okay, Okay, okay, yeah, because this
is definitely just a bullet point. Yeah, we're now going

(20:55):
to go finally into theories. There are forty theories, No,
we're not doing for We're not doing everybody. All of
our listeners were just like, no, we're not doing that.
I think there's about a half dozen er so, but no,
there's I've picked out some. There are. There's been a

(21:17):
lot of them. Some of the older ones have really
been disproven, but some of them are all over the maps.
So we're just gonna go with kind of a short list.
One thing I am gonna address early on with these
theories is Darwin was not healthy for most of his life,
not only as an adult, but as a child. He

(21:40):
wasn't extremely healthy. He had some things going on, and
a lot of these theories will focus on Darwin from
the day he stepped on the h M S. Beagle forward.
So that's something that I want to I want to
bring up so everybody knows I do. There are a
couple that we'll talk about specifically, but that's kind of

(22:02):
a general concern that I've had with most of the
theories that are out there. Theory number one, cyclic vomiting syndrome,
also known as CVS. Yeah, um, so the medical science
doesn't really know what causes CVS. What they do know
is that the symptoms, which a lot of these theories.

(22:22):
We're gonna talk a lot about symptoms. Uh. Those symptoms
include vomiting, nausea, headaches, migraines, and occasionally abdominal pain. It
did some reading, Uh, and this is so bad. But
people who suffer from this can have up to a
dozen episodes an hour. Yeah, not fun at all. Um.

(22:47):
The the other thing that is kind of corroborates this
is that people who suffer from CVS also have issues
with motion sickness, and these attacks can be brought on
the tacks of vomiting can be brought on from both
positive and negative stimulus, you know, emotional stimulus. So yeah,

(23:08):
I'm so happy or yeah maybe that's right. Came from
right now? No more fake throwing up noises. It's not happening. Yeah.
So we've talked about this, but Darwin was prone to

(23:30):
being sick and ill and losing his stomach, and not
just from c sick but there was also psychological and
social stressors that would set him off. He was known,
as he put it, to be knocked down by his
attacks and that could last anywhere from hours to days,
two weeks. That actually seems to be part of what

(23:54):
may have delayed being knocked down, him being so ill
for such lengths of time as part of what the
ladle out of his writing, because he was taking years
and years to write things, and yet he would lose
months and months of time to being so ill to
cope for what appears to have been some of that
psychological stresser. One of the things that Darwin did, which

(24:15):
is this kind of genius and kind of creepy hermit
old man, is he put mirrors in places in his
house so he could see who was in the room
before he walked into it, so that if it was
a guest that he didn't want to interact with he
was worried that it was going to set him off,
he could just about face and walk away. He never
know you, Oh so and so is in the parlor.

(24:37):
I'm just gonna go back upstairs. The major problem with
this particular theory is that CVS primarily appears in children
between the ages of three and seven. I don't know
that that's I mean, you literally just not five minutes ago,
said well, the problem with most of these theories is
it doesn't address the fact that Darwin was sick most

(24:57):
of his life. You're right, that's and I didn't see
anything that said that Darwin was suffering from as a child,
bouts of throwing up every hour on the hour, from
multiple times as a child that do we know is
cvs the sort of thing that gets progressively worse, Like

(25:19):
could it have been that the onset he was just
like kind of throwing up but once in a while,
and they thought he just has a weak stomach, you know.
It's I can't find a lot about Darwin as a
child other than kind of some general statements. And that's
probably because if father didn't, you know, sit down and

(25:39):
write down little Charles got ill multiple times today because
he was probably at work. There's not a whole lot
of that. And I do understand that there's kind of
that funny division between this one actually talks about him
and what could be a child, except that it sounds
so extreme sure that I can't see someone who had

(26:00):
and maybe he didn't have that bad. Maybe it wasn't
that he was, you know, prone to being ill multiple
times an hour continually, as some people that have this
extremely bad do. I'm not I'm not positive on that,
but it just from from the way that it was
described in the in the journals and stuff that I

(26:20):
read about it. It sounded to me like it was
so debilitating that you couldn't do anything. And I didn't
see a lot when or read a lot when Darwin
was on land and not saying in the Beagle. I
didn't see a whole lot where suddenly Darwin was on land.
It was always yeah, I'm so happy on land, not

(26:41):
yeah I'm so happy on land. I've been incapacitated for
two days because I've been so ill, just like I
was when I was on the ship. So that's that's
why I questioned it, because it's almost like a gap,
if that makes sense, in in the illness. I don't know,
this is This is me shrugging my shoulders. I'm not sure. Yeah,
absolutely so, I don't let's throw that one out. Plenty

(27:04):
of other ones. Well, yeah, there there are anothers And
I don't know. We'll throw that out, but we will
go on to our next theory. The next theory says
that Charles Darwin had Crone's disease. Do either of you
know much about crones? Yeah, I knew somebody who had crowns.
I have some friends. It's not a it's it's a
really I feel feel for people who have crones, because

(27:28):
it's not a good thing. Yes, one woman that I
know had had to get an operation that took part
of a colon out. Yeah, that does happen. There's there's
a host of treatments for it today that for people
who had it before there weren't. Yeah, and unfortunately, I
think that it's not guaranteed that it's not going to
come back, even though they took out the unhealthy part
of a recovery colon. That's that's that's true. And let's

(27:50):
let's talk about crones because that will kind of help
explain some of why. If you don't know. Crone's is
an inflammatory bowel disease. It can affect the digestive system
anywhere from the beginning which would be the mouth, to
the end the anus, so the whole way through. We
don't know what causes crones exactly. There's thoughts that it

(28:14):
it could be an autoimmune disease, or maybe it's just
an immune system overreaction, could be a genetic defect, or
it could be caused by environmental factors like diet and
microbes that enter your system. I mean, I don't know.
There's probably not, but it could be Yeah, I mean

(28:35):
it's possible, it's it's something that we haven't figured out yet.
So yeah, most of the people, I guess I've known
a couple of people with crones and uh, you know,
they've tried you know, varied diets or like moving other
places and things like that, and that very rarely helps them.
So the only thing that I've the people that I've known,
the only thing that helped them was either I think

(28:56):
it's every three months of steroid injection of some kind,
or I have a friend to uh he ingests hookworm
a certain dosage of it, which is then makes his
immune system so busy fighting hookworm that it doesn't go
crazy and as intestine. He's been doing it for years
and he's never been healthier short of always being on

(29:19):
the drugs. It's better than being on drugs. It's kind
of a natural way to go about him provides some
nice home for them hookworms. He's a hookworm preserve. I
don't know if people are as familiar with us um
with Crohn's disease. So like, the symptoms are well, the

(29:40):
symptoms are kind of varied and they come on and
there's a pretty big age age range. They can come
on anywhere between fifteen and thirty. So this potentially could
fall within the realm of Darwin because he was twenty
one when he first left with the Beagle. Yeah, and
it I mean, I think it can of back to
you even younger than that. Sometimes it can. Yeah, it's

(30:04):
it's entirely possible. There are you know, sadly, people who
begin to show signs of it for seven or eight
years old. But as you were asking devon the symptoms
they come and go, which you know that's referred to
as a flare up and they range from cramping and
bloating to gas or diarrhea or even bleeding of the intestines. Uh,

(30:27):
there's sadly and uh there's a possibility of intestinal blockage
or constipation and that can cause scarring of the intestines,
which can then a cause further damage and be cause
vomiting and nausea. And this is this is the insult
injury part of it for me, is we talked about

(30:48):
that it affects everything from beginning to end. The mouth.
The beginning you people who have crones can develop sores
and ulcers in their mouth, which by the way, Darwin
had he did he did. Indeed, other symptoms that people
can suffer would include fatigue, anemia, and pale complexion. But

(31:09):
let's let's go look at the corroborating symptoms that Darwin experience.
He had abdominal pain, had constant gas vomiting which specifically
was stomach fluids. It wasn't food fatigue, and of course
all that was coming and going over the course of
his life. And then he also had skin rashes and boils.

(31:31):
So that's that's kind of corroborating. Yeah, there were there
were some other symptoms that he had to Yeah, well,
you know the thing is is when I was doing
the research, there's a couple of medical papers which I've
used for part of this that talk about the fact
that they believed that Darwin had crones, but he had
it specifically in the upper small intestines, and that I

(31:53):
read that paper and it's interesting how they can tell
what part of your digestive system is as a problem. Yeah,
it is, Well, it's it's because of the difference in
the symptoms. When it's in the upper intestines, it's primarily
associated with some nausea and vomiting and pain in the
upper abdomen, which can become intense, and that again was

(32:15):
described by Darwin. He described the origin of the air
as somewhere lower down than the stomach, which would kind
of align with that location. The symptoms increased after he
eat a large meal, but weren't as bad after small meals. Yeah.

(32:38):
Soft foods like plain puddings also didn't bother him. Evidently,
his wife Emma Darwin. Her cookbooks were described as being
about one half puddings. What kind of puddings are we talking?
Are we talking like puddings as we Americans think of puddings?
Are we thinking of like bread puddings? Are we think
thinking like bread puddings? Stuff like that? I don't think

(33:01):
without a lot of protein or fats and more like
plain foods. I gotta be honest, I didn't I didn't
actually look up Emma Darwin's cookbook. I don't know exactly
what was in that. I just I'm bringing this up
because I have something I'm going to add in a second.
I just want to kind of like build my case.
All right, I got you. I wonder if you can

(33:22):
find your cookbook on the internet. Oh, maybe on Amazon.
Here's here's a couple more things about when crones affects
the upper intestines. People don't normally have diarrhea as as much,
say as people would have the effects in the lower
portions of their intentional system, and instead they tend to

(33:44):
be they tend to suffer more from constipation, and that's
something that later in life Darwin had he ordered animas
for that very reason. Of course, a lot of older
people tend to get out of constipation too. I don't
know why that, and that could just be a symptom
of age. You're absolutely right. Joe Darwin complained he had

(34:05):
a couple of other strange complaints that this research seemed
to point to us being symptoms of crowns. He complained
of pins and needles in his hands and fingers that
kept him from working. He also complained of numbness and
said his hands felt like they've been dipped in hell fire.

(34:25):
This research says that this may be due to damage
of sensitive nerve fibers. According to this researcher, that is
a very common thing with Crone's disease, and it's it's
attributed to a deficiency in vitamin B twelve and that
either whether that's through the lack of absorption or what

(34:47):
have you. They're saying that that causes damage to the
sensitive nerve fibers. Yeah. There, And there's a number of
other things that they brought up, you know, say sing
that the twitching and spasm ng that Darwin suffered was
due to hyperventilation, which would have been caused by his

(35:09):
incessant vomiting, which would then would mean he'd have CEO
two and hydrogen issues in his his respiratory system. I honestly,
I didn't dive a whole lot into that, but that's
what that pointed out as another sign that it had
to be Crones. But I can just can I just
read you a list of symptoms quick, yeah, okay, extreme fatigue,

(35:34):
pale skin, weakness, shortness of breath, chest pain, frequent infections, headaches,
dizziness or lightheadedness, cold hands or feet, inflammation or soreness
of your tongue, fast heartbeat, poor appetite, and uncomfortable tingling
or crawling feeling in your extremities. Is a fairly comprehensive
list of iron efficiency, iron deficiency, anemia. Yeah right, So

(36:00):
he could be because of Crone's disease, or he could
have been an emic his whole life, right, if he
had a poor appetite, and he said, oh, my temmy
hurts after I eat a lot of food because I
don't get enough iron. Well, then he's eating less suff
it becomes a vicious cycle, gets worse and worse and
worse as he goes on. I think you know that
list is pretty comprehensive, and you know all of these things.

(36:22):
It makes a lot of sense to me. It could
be from a crone's disease kind of situation because his
body is not absorbing it. It could be because he
didn't get it. It's possible he like didn't get it
as a child out of his diet. Yeah, I don't know. Yeah, No,
I mean it's that's that's not uncommon, though I correct
me if I'm wrong, Devon. Is it not typical that

(36:45):
the people who have iron deficiency more often than not,
it's more women than men. Not that I'm saying that
men don't have this. No, men get it. I mean,
but it's it's not as it's more frequent for women
because we bleed more often. I mean, I mean genuinely
because our body is to produce more blood. But I'm
getting that. That doesn't mean that Darwin couldn't have suffered

(37:06):
from it. I would play iron deficiencies way more common
than Crohn's disease, you know, So I don't know, But
I don't know how like that seems like something that
should have been recognized at the time, you know, doesn't
it doesn't It seem like the sort of thing, how
do you how do you test for an iron deficiency? Well,
I mean they test your blood. I mean either they

(37:29):
look at your blood or they do an iron test.
But I don't know. I just I don't even know.
I haven't researched this, so I don't even know how
well understood blood was in those days, part of the
finteenth century. This is this is the joy of doing
your show where it's a conversation and suddenly one of
us pops the question and we're like, crap, why didn't
I look into that? Didn't I look that up? That

(37:49):
would have been really easy. Yeah, people know how to
use Google. But I think, you know, I don't know.
It seems like a pretty straightforward and that, you know,
it wold have intensified when he was on the ship
because he really wasn't eating well right, and then by
the time he got biscuits, stuff like, probably because he
was seasick, right, which whatever I mean, I think that

(38:12):
you can even say that it was as simple as
he got really seasick and he had this other thing
that was a pre existing condition, which you know, kind
of caused the snowball effect almost of he wasn't a
healthy man, he was deficient in something. He went on
a ship and got seasick, so he was even eating
more poorly and feeling sicker and so much stuff that

(38:34):
he really wasn't really wasn't getting anything anyways. You know,
it gets off, he's fine on land because he's just
you know, he's not seasick anymore, and he's eating a
little better and he's feeling better and he's out in
the sun and you know, and then he gets back
on the ship and it's awful. And then by the
time he gets off the ship, he's become so deficient
that it just keeps getting worse and worse. I don't know, no,
I mean that it could absolutely have caught and if

(38:55):
he was if he was a chronic complainer, you know,
and he was kind of one of those willful people
who was like, well I don't feel good, like I said,
I'm just gonna eat putting all the time, not like
the steak that I should be eating, you know what
I mean, I don't know. Sorry not to like totally
steamroll your Crone's disease. That they could have been crones
because of you know, or it could have been iron
efficiency or anemia because of crone's. But yeah, no, no, absolutely,

(39:20):
I mean these that's one of the things that I
found in doing this research. As you find a cause,
but then it it just it kind of spider webs
out from that central point. So that's very that's very apt,
and it could have been any of those. Let's move
on to our next theory. Okay, another theory. Well, the
next theory is that Darwin had mitochondrial issues. And we're

(39:45):
now going to get into some heavy science. Mitochondrial issues
and disorders are caused by dysfunctions in the mitochondria. And
you might be asking yourself right now, what is mitochondria.
They are specialized components known as organelles of the cells
that are present in all living things except bacteria. What

(40:09):
mitochondria basically do is they use the oxygen we breathe
in to get energy from the electrons found in our
food that we eat, So basically they're they're gently pulling
that energy away and that's what powers us. They're they're
kind of little fuel packets that we run on. Yeah,

(40:31):
and the vast majority of the energy that we have
is generated in that process. So they're they're really important
if your mitochondria don't function properly, or or if you
were to say, run out of oxygen, your your body
does have ways of compensating, and they're not the best

(40:54):
ways to make energy. I'm going to say it that way,
because that way of making energy is fermentation, which is
not a clean process. It's actually a really dirty way
of making energy. It's got a lot of toxic byproducts
with like carbon dioxides, acids, hydrogen gas. Lactic acid is

(41:17):
another thing, which, of course, when you get enough of
that in your body, that's kind of the the achy
muscle syndrome. You know, we've work too much, you got
built up of lactic acid. Well, your body has ways
to either mechanically or chemically get rid of it, but
if you have too much, it can cause a lot
of ill effects which are highly highly um they're highly

(41:39):
negative for you. Interestingly, you as a person. Yeah, each
of us as a person, not specifically this time. Every human,
every human gets all of their mitochondria from their mother.
And there's some other science that debates that, but we're
not going to go into that. But why I bring

(42:01):
that up is that Darwin's mother was ill, as we
had talked about in the beginning, and she potentially could
have had mitochondrial issues herself. Yeah, well he had kids, right, Well,
Darwin had brothers and sisters. He was one of six,

(42:21):
and his brothers and sisters all suffered similar issues as him,
to varying degrees. He had ten children, Darwin did. Yeah,
of the seven that lived past childhood, they were all fine.
But that's because if you think about the mitochondrial aspect
of it, if his mother had an issue, she would

(42:42):
have passed it on to her kids, who, as I said,
had issues. Good note, because they got there michondria from Emma.
So it could potentially be that. And it's amazing to me.
I didn't even think about this, but Darwin died at
seventy three. We were just talking about his kids. All
of his kids lived to be in there, those the

(43:04):
ones that lived into adulthood seventies, eighties, nearly the nineties.
Like it was a really long lived family, which was
just kind of crazy to me. I never realized that before.
Well that's that's a long time to live at that. Well,
for for Charles himself, I would say yes, because again
he was born on eighteen o nine, but his children

(43:27):
were born in the eighteen forties four wards, so they
were dying in like the nineteen tens to nineteen thirties,
where medicines a little better than when their dad was
a young man. I'm just saying there's some factors that
it advances that would have helped them, but still they
were long lived people. Another thing though, that I want

(43:50):
to bring up, because we're still a mitochondria. As much
as I know everybody's like next theory, we're not done
with mitochondria because this one keeps going. There is mitochondrial
issue that is called melas syndrome, and that is mitochondrial
mitochondrial and suffer myopathy. Thank you, Joe. I totally said

(44:14):
that one like a hundred times, and it worked as
soon as he couldn't do it. That's a hard word,
if word, but basically, but basically that's a state where
a person doesn't use their their This this syndrome is
a state where people don't use their mitochondria as their

(44:35):
primary source of gaining energy. So that's again that's a
chronic issue where there that's an issue where they chronically
have build up of all of those bad things that
we talked about in their system, the lactic acid and
everything else. But it's a rare syndrome and it's extremely

(44:58):
hard to diagnose because it shares symptoms with I don't know,
like eight to ten other syndromes that are out there,
like crowns and chronic barfing syndrome, no, like other things
that are much more scientific than that. But it does
have a host of symptoms that are very similar to Darwin.

(45:21):
And again we're gonna go through this. The major ones
that are going to be migraines, vomiting, seizures, cognitive problems,
and neurological issues. The prognosis isn't good for people who
have this, and those some people who have this syndrome
can live to be fifty or sixty. Most people don't

(45:43):
make it that long. It would sound like if your
body has got to work that hard and it's still
getting bad, bad energy and lots of toxins down. Well, yeah,
and it's gonna be something that's going to affect you
from the very beginning. So this kind of plays into well,
this could explain why Darwin was sick as a kid.
He wasn't a well child. But the thing that I

(46:04):
don't that makes me think it's not right is that
the people that have this, they start experiencing stroke like episodes.
And the latest of the latest that comes on is
about age forty. Yeah, go ahead, lost time, tachycardia, muscle spasms.
I mean, is it required that it's a stroke or

(46:27):
is it stroke like symptoms because those sounds stroke like
to me, it progressively causes brain damage. If he lost
time and had memory loss, he had brain damage. I mean,
even if it I mean, even if it is like
a dementia sort of situation, that's brain damage. So he
had neurological but he wasn't. He wasn't a tottering, confused

(46:51):
man at the end, which at seventy three, if he
had been experiencing these stroke like attacks, he would have
had extreme brain damage by that time, probably, yeah, which
means he would not have been nearly as sharp and
well together in my mind. Well, It's hard, don't These
things are always so hard because it's like, how firm

(47:12):
is that? You know? It's the like, well, people with
this type of cancer die within five years, but then
there's the one percent that lives for fifty more years.
You know. I think with these sort of things, it's rare, right,
and should we be saying, yeah, Darwin had this super
rare thing, and also he was the super rare person
who no, we shouldn't. But I do think that some

(47:34):
of his symptoms could be stroke. Like that's all I
wanted to say, and I will I will back you
up with that with this bit of information, which is
one of Darwin's sons. He went to college, he had
a promising career. I cannot at the moment think of
what that career was. But instead he went back and
he was basically his father's research assistant and secretary and

(47:58):
helped him with a lot of the writing. I don't
want to smear Darwin's name, but it is entirely possible
that his son compensated and covered some of that, you know,
protect your father, that's a very natural reaction. I don't
know that that's true, but it could have been, and
that maybe Maybe you're right. Maybe it was worse than

(48:19):
we know, and that's why we didn't know. It's let's
move on to another theory one may have heard of. Yes,
I think most people have heard of this, and I'm
not crazy about this theory, but I went ahead and
in the in the spirit of what we do, I
included it. And that theory is lactose intolerance. With the

(48:42):
bazilion versions of milk that's out there. I'm guessing that
most people know what lactose intolerance is, but if you don't,
here's what it is. It's the intolerant. The lactose intolerance
is the inability of humans, most the adults, though sometimes
it is children, to be able to digest lactose, which

(49:05):
is a sugar found in milk and other dairy by
products or is it byproduct or is it a product product.
It's a product Okay, direct byproducts suddenly didn't sound right
to me. Uh, it's caused by Lactose intolerance is caused
by low levels of lactasse, which is an enzyme that

(49:27):
you have in your body that allows you to break
down lactose via digested You break it down into little
bits and pieces so that you can observe it and
use it. I mean, that's the simplest version to do it.
For folks that have lactose intolerance, the symptoms are gonna
be or they could be bloating in cramps of the

(49:48):
in the abdomen, flatulence, diarrhea, nausea, rumbling stomach, or potentially vomiting,
and this would all follow consuming dairy products. Studies I've
read for this theory go as such foods such as sugar, bacon, butter,
and any desserts seemed to set off symptoms in Darwin.

(50:11):
And this is according to this researcher. I didn't see
this corroborating anywhere else, just just so I had that
on the board. They also said that Darwin had a
sweet tooth and that the majority of his wife's recipes
involved heavy cream those puddings we talked about before. To
make things worse, typical remedies of the time for feeling

(50:33):
ill were of the nineteenth century. Of that time were
to have a warm milk as a nightcap, so that
could have aggravated his symptoms if it was indeed lactose intolerance.
You know, um, when he was at sea in the
Beagle that his symptoms should have gotten better, right, because

(50:56):
he wouldn't. I mean maybe they had cheese on board.
I don't know, well, but they would have hard cheeses
which don't have lactose in Um. Yeah, I had the
very same thoughts. So actually that's a great question to segue.
What about Celiac disease, though, which is gluten intolerance, which
has the same kind of symptoms plus anemia. I'm sorry,
I there's been so much on gluten. I just like

(51:18):
the real version of it. Celiac disease is the real
version of it. It you know, includes all of these symptoms, right,
pretty much all of his stuff, but also causes you know,
iron deficiency, which we talked about earlier, could have caused
a lot of his symptoms arthritis, depression, and anxiety, seizures,
mouth sores, head sores. Those are you know again, this

(51:40):
is that rabbit hole right of like we just we
could piggyback on every single one. But I think if
we're going to do an intolerance, gluten intolerance makes way
more sense than lactose intolerance in my mind. Yeah, and
I immediately would have ruled out. But but you know
the thing, I mean, you both have a great point
about well, what if, why was it? What was symptoms

(52:00):
have been better on the Beagle, And wouldn't he have
probably not been getting that much milk when he was
traveling and he's on land. He would have been getting
more on land than he would have on the ship.
He was not always in major cities. He'd be hanging
out with indigenous people's so it's not as if they've
got a lot to spare and they'd be like, hey,

(52:21):
Mr Darwin, here's a jug of milk, Like, I don't
think that that would be that common of a product.
But he definitely wouldn't have had it on the ship.
That's not so they don't keep perishables on they don't.
That wouldn't have been the cause for a sea sickness.
And and my other problem with this is, and again
I know this is a rabbit hole, but lactose intolerance

(52:41):
doesn't cause memory loss. It doesn't cause, as far as
I can tell, muscle spasms outside of the gut. So
there's is why Celiaxes might chose an intolerance because it
cause those things. I don't know, I know, I know
it is completely possible. Yeah, absolutely, Actually I'm shocked that

(53:04):
nobody's come up with that already. If nobody has Scarlett
the paper, well, yeah, four, which they do the thing.
I'm sorry, I don't know how to write science stuff.
It's inescapable. Is how you start your paper? ESCA? Yes,

(53:26):
well let's uh okay, well let's let's let's get away
from the intolerance one theories that we're talking about. We
have at least one more. We've got more than one
more to go. We've got two more to go, so
we're almost done there. This theory is that everything that
Darwin suffered was psycho smatic. Actually it could have literally

(53:48):
all been in his head psychosomatic conditions which are now
referred to in the d s M five. If you
don't know what the d s M five is, it's
the Diagnostics Statistic Manual of Mental Disorders. But in the
volume five, yes, thank you, in the ds M five
they've I guess it's changed from volume four to volume five.

(54:12):
They've now put it under kind of a general heading,
which is a somatic symptom disorders. It's when someone believes
that they have a physical illness or an injury where
there is no apparent physical cause for said symptom and
it's not a psychological issue or just a disorder. So

(54:36):
schizophrenia is something that is a psychological disorder, but psycho
smatic things don't have anything specific that can be pointed to.
Some people say that it's almost like hypochondria and they're crazy,
and these people aren't crazy. They they truly and wholly
believe that something is wrong, and it can manifest itself

(55:00):
in real and sometimes debilitating symptoms which can really really
do bad things to people, and it can cause degrees
of pain which are excruciating. There's one of the the
examples that I guess I got, which is probably the
best generalization of how this work that I've ever read,

(55:24):
is as follows. A person is concerned about their health
and they think they have a heart problem, So they
constantly focus on what they were, what they're experiencing, and
what's going on with their body, and that constant worry
initiates their basic feary action, which is an increase in
heart rate. Suddenly they realize their heart is beating faster.

(55:49):
That validates that they're right, that there is something that
is wrong with their heart, and that starts the cycle again.
Suddenly they get even more afraid and their heart rate
goes up even higher, and it works on and on
and on. That That is, in its simplest form, how
the psychosomatic conditions operate. Folks that have this, they seem

(56:13):
to be able to well, it's it's it's inadvertently influenced
their body's functions. It's you've heard mind over matter, but
this is mind over body and to a point that
it can be detrimental. Well, I mean I think everybody
can do that to some extent. I mean you can
you know, say I kind of don't feel good, I

(56:34):
really don't feel good. Uh, and just like you kind
of work yourself into that, you know, mix, or like
you're hanging out with somebody who's sick and then later
and yeah, you take one cough and suddenly you're you
have it, or you know, somebody says, oh is that
an ant on? You know, it's fine, and suddenly your
skin is crawling. You know it's that. But the differences
is that way more extreme? Yes, it's it's much more extreme,

(56:57):
and it's it tends to be much more as a
long term and since you know, pain is a signal
from body to your brain and sense, it's routed basically
into your brain. Your brain processes and recognizes it as pain.
It's entirely conceivable that your brain could actually manufacture pain
signals for itself. Could I mean, it's like, yeah, it's control, no,

(57:20):
but yeah, it really is. It's it's the computer that
operates everything about you. So it could be misfiring signals
because it it's just some other part of it is
decided that this is going on and it sends the signal.
I mean, it's this is um It's a very murky
area when you start getting into conditions like this and

(57:42):
in the brain. The most common things though that people
experience or or report it's gonna be heart palpitations, vomiting,
lack or shortness of breath, diarrhea, pain in the back
and joint, some muscles, head pains, aches, and dizziness. And
there are there are theories out there that this is

(58:05):
a coping mechanism for some other larger emotional stressor I've
seen stuff that said that this is what was wrong
with Darwin, that he had a psychosomatic issue and it
was all tied back to the death of his mother. Again,
I understand that that's going to be a very large
and traumatic event I don't know. I don't see any

(58:27):
huge ties to it. I've also seen the same thing proffered,
except saying that it's tied to his resentment or hatred
of his father, who again, as they said before, was
he's either described as very stern or a tyrant. So
we could be you know, these these folks are pointing
and saying, well, it's got to be because of his dad,

(58:47):
a right. You know, I think both of those are
a little a little thin though, because like back in
the day, in his day, it was not at all
in common to lose a parent at a very young age.
So that would have been a hell of a lot
of sick people. Yeah, yeah, that's that's a normal thing.
Or like, hey, how many brothers and sisters did he have?
He had six? He was one of six, right, and

(59:09):
so for it to all affect them all right, because
they were all sick, right, correct. So I don't know,
to different degrees, that seems weird to me too, that
everybody would be suffering from the same kind of psychosomatic Well, okay,
and if if well we can we can also flip
the tables on it and say, if it is from
a major death situation, like that. Darwin had ten children,

(59:30):
three of whom died at a very young age, and
his first I think it was his first child died
and his very the first and the tenth died at
in infancy if I remember right. And then one of
the girls died I think she was eight or ten,
I'm not positive off the top of my head. But
why didn't the other seven have these kind of issues

(59:52):
with the loss of their sibling or I mean, do
you know what I'm saying, like, why is it more prevalent?
So I'm not saying I'm not I'm not definitely not
trying to say that anything negative against the folks that
experience these kind of symptoms, but it seems that it'd
be rare that that many siblings would all experience this
the exact same way and have it. Yes, yeah, that

(01:00:14):
that is an anomaly to me. There are detractors for
this particular theory. We might be detractors, we might be
a little bit, but well, you know what's really funny
is that I don't mean to get off track, but
all of these uh, these medical research papers that I read,
they would espouse why they were right, and then it
almost seems as if they knew the authors of the

(01:00:37):
other papers, because they would specifically go after things that
were in the other papers, saying this is why that
theory is wrong, and that that's where I got some
of the the issues with the Darwin having a psycho
somatic conditions bit, and I'll just I'll just summarize it here,
which is people say, well, he wouldn't have had that,

(01:01:01):
because if if it was that, then stress situations for
his work should have been much worse and it should
have almost prevented him from working. One of the things
that's pointed out is that he never had a quote
unquote attack problem when he was writing on the Origin
of Species, which I don't buy because it took him

(01:01:24):
eight years to write the damn thing. So I don't
know how they validate that. Uh, there is some evidence
that says that he did have stressful situations, but they
say it wasn't. Is when he wrote his work on
on corals, which took him I believe it was three

(01:01:45):
and a half years. He was only working on it,
what was it twenty three months out of that time,
and and investigating corals wasn't all that confrontational, whereas on
the Origin of species I mean that that was gonna
was a poop storm. He was basically killing God and
everything that we knew about science up to that date

(01:02:07):
with that theory, Well, I don't think it really kills God. Actually,
well there's there unless unless you're a creationist, of course,
But well no, there's actually a lot of good stuff
about he and his wife and their debates on God
and stuff like that and what his theory had on it.
But that's that's you know, that stuff is out there
and really good, and we're not going to go into that.

(01:02:28):
I guess, you know. My question would be did he
have really big episodes when his kids died? Like is
their correlation there, because that's a pretty big stressful thing,
and is that documented. I do know that Darwin suffered
greatly after the death of his daughter the she was,
like I said, she was eight to ten. I almost

(01:02:50):
want to say her name was Annie. I wish I'd
written this down the other two too. Did he suffer?
I don't know how much he suffered. I haven't seen
as much of that. His His last son, the tenth child,
died very quickly. Uh, and I believe his first child
didn't make it more than a year. At the most,

(01:03:12):
I could be wrong on that. Games like, after your
first kid dies, maybe maybe you're gonna suffer a hell
of a lot more than probably. I mean, not to
be insensitive, Yeah, but the thing about it is, though,
is it it was not uncommon for kids to die.
You It's like if you have if you have a
kid who's like, to say, a couple of weeks old,
and they die, you know, I'm sure that's gonna hurt

(01:03:34):
really bad. But but if you've got a daughter who's
like eight ten years old, you've been hanging out with
it for all these years, you know, and you think
she's made it past the hump of dying and you know,
dying in young childhood, and all of a sudden she's
taken from you. Anyway, that's gotta hurt pretty bad. Yeah.
I want to say she got scarlet fever which had
been sweeping through the area. Yeah, I mean, it's gonna
I'm not, you know, trying to say that we're not that,

(01:03:57):
but I think it doesn't make sense to me that,
you know, he those would be documented cases. But I
just don't think this is a good theory anyway. On
board with a psychosomatic condition, I did say his his
his offspring had a pretty good survival rate for those days. Yeah,
they really did seven of ten. That's pretty good. That's
good for that era. You're right. I mean they were

(01:04:19):
also a bit in a wealthy family. That really helps PA. Yes,
let's now go on to the last theory. Yeah, we're
actually at the end of theories almost. Our final theory
is that Darwin was suffering from chagas disease. The assassin beetle.

(01:04:40):
I really again, this is another one I have issues with,
but I'm going to run it through. Is the theory
says that Darwin contracted a parasite while he was on
his excursions in South America. And the theory it doesn't
pin down a date. There's two potential dates that this
might have happened. And I've actually I actually because I

(01:05:02):
had the Beagle Diaries. I read the descriptions on these
dates or the notes and entries. One of them is
going to be September of eighteen thirty four or late September,
or the other one is in late March of eighteen
thirty five. The eighteen thirty four date works for me

(01:05:23):
because Darwin describes a lot of symptoms of illness that
could corroborate with this. The eighteen thirty five date gets
brought up because lo and behold. The bug itself is
mentioned in his writings, Uh they there was a swarm
of locusts, And then later on he says a bug

(01:05:45):
bit him and he thinks it was this bug. This well,
this bug is called well, it can be called the
kissing bug or the assassin bug. But if Darwin he
he missed, he missnamed it, he got the name wrong
in his diaries, it's the benchuka bug. These things are

(01:06:07):
really really not a good looking bug, got a weird
like probiscus on them almost. I mean it's it's it's
definitely it's a biting insect. They they're kind of like
a flee or tick in terms of they live off
of the blood of other animals. Problem is they also
have a tendency to pack around a parasite, and that

(01:06:29):
parasite is gonna be tried penas soma cruizy, which is
an hasty little parasite. It's not a good thing, and
it affects people in two stages. The acute stage, or
the first stage, last for several weeks and can be
displayed possibly as fever, fatigue, body aches, muscle pain, headaches, rash,

(01:06:55):
loss of appetite, diarrhea, nausea, and vomiting anybody. But can
I get any more symptoms I can throw? That was
a huge um I do I do? Before we get
too far into the second phase, want to talk about
one thing that comes up that I don't that really
makes me think this isn't right. And that is one

(01:07:17):
of the most notable signs of infection with this parasite,
which is called Romana's sign, and that is a swelling
of the eyelid, which appears on the side of the
body that the infection entered from. Seems like he would
have mentioned, Yeah, and if you look at pictures of

(01:07:37):
people who are showing this sign, it's not as if
their eyelid is just a little swollen. It's the eyelid
swollen and drooping from the weight. It's very very obvious. Yeah. Well,
we'll talk about the chronic stage, or the second phase
of this, which doesn't always appear. Not everybody it gets it.

(01:08:00):
The symptoms of the chronic stage are heart damage and
heart rhythm anomalies, and those tend to kill. There are
also going to be digestive issues and massive weight loss.
That's that's over a long period of time though, right,
it's over a long period of time. Understand it as

(01:08:21):
you get the initial information and then like twenty years later,
then you die. That is correct. That is correct. And again,
as with all of these papers, I found attractors saying
this couldn't be what he was suffering. One of them
specifically says that Darwin began showing signs of the chronic
phase four years after these, after eighteen thirty five, so

(01:08:44):
in eighteen thirty nine. Though I could never they never
say specifically what it is. They're referencing that he was
showing That told them that he was getting it so early.
But I do agree that I don't think that this
is what's going on, because if he had this parasite,
it knocks about you know, if you live a long time,

(01:09:06):
it will knock ten years off your life, and it
causes major, major heart problems, and you suffer major heart
problems for quite a while. I mean swelling of the
heart that slows you down and really you're bed ridden,
you can't do anything, which does to me, doesn't match
up with what we know about Darwin, and he was

(01:09:29):
out climbing rocks and hiking and doing things like that.
If he had a heart condition, I don't see him
doing that. You know. The thing is too is again,
what I know about shock is that if he had it,
he got it at such a young age, he would
not have lived to be seventy three. If he actually
had it exactly would have been twenty three, twenty four.
He would have died in his forties, maybe his fifties.

(01:09:52):
He wouldn't have lived forty sixty years with it, or
forty or fifty years with So that's that's my problem
with it. Um YEA believe it or not. Thank God,
we don't have any more theories on that. I don't
want to lift off any more symptoms. I think I
have them all. Now I am ready to diagnose the patient. Okay,

(01:10:15):
Dr Joe, but on your stethoscope and let's have it. Yeah.
I'm going to go with Crone's disease for a hundred
points um and I prescribed to aspirin. Good luck. How
about you, doctor Dr Devon? I yeah, I think Crone's disease.
I think the thing that I pushed the most for
is that he definitely had anemia in my mind, he

(01:10:37):
definitely had anemia what caused that, But I don't know
Crone's disease, maybe celiac disease, maybe some just he was
just iron deficient or be twelve bad diet possible, it happens,
we're going to prescribe anything of a steak steak, think
steak actually CREAMI of weight is great if you're iron deficient. Yeah,

(01:11:00):
it really has a huge levels of iron in it. Yeah. Oh,
I didn't know that. I personally, I don't. I don't
know that any of these are right. I think that
it's kind of as I've done this before with most stories.
I think it's kind of a combination. I think that
Darwin probably did have some mild intestinal issue. I don't

(01:11:20):
know necessarily that it was Crown's. But when you think
about the way Darwin approached science and everything he did,
I mean, he was very methodical in his observations and
his writings. He really really focused and thought and spent
a lot a lot of time observing it and just
going over and over and over it. I can see

(01:11:43):
him doing the same thing with his health. I can
see him saying, wait, well, I made airs in the
morning and at lunch but I didn't do it this afternoon,
and then the next day. Oh, I made airs all
three times. Something's wrong? What's going on? Like having to
check it out to the point that he may have
made it worse inadvertently by just focusing so much on it.

(01:12:07):
I mean, to be honest, we all have things that
happen to our intestines that we don't track because that's
just your intestines. It's it's one of those things. And
I thought, I thought to myself, you know, I should
actually start keeping closer track of what eat so I
can see which ones make me get their quote. I
never get around to doing it. I've noticed a certain things,
certain things I've definitely drawn the connection. But if I

(01:12:28):
kept a careful list of everything that I ate and drank,
then I would have a pretty good idea of everything.
I think I would too, but because there are certain
things I can't eat or drink. But I also think
that I don't do that because then you can't help.
But oh, well, suddenly something's going on, so what else
is it? And then you're like a friend of mine

(01:12:48):
who basically just eats rice it's on a rice diet
and taking supplement pills and it's because of crones and
he's on it's an elimination diet, cut it all out
and start to add things in. But this poor guy
still has such a small palette of what he can eat.
So I, personally, I think that it's a combination. Ye

(01:13:11):
says you can only have one disease something. No. I
really wish that that was the case for a lot
of people, the disease only. Uh yeah, So I think
you're right out. That could have been he could have
had half a dozen things. Yeah, we're gonna we're gonna
close this one out. People are probably gonna want to
know where to find some of the stuff that we've

(01:13:32):
talked about, and that's going to be on our website,
which is Thinking Sideways podcast dot com. You can find
this episode, you can find some of the links to
some of the real or some of the research. Some
of the links to some of the research. Sounds really
dumb now that I say there are going to be
some links on the website to our research material. All

(01:13:53):
other episodes are going to be there. We also have
links on the website for merchandise, and we've also got
that's gonna be right on the right hand side. And
the sidebars. There's a little picture and it's right above
the PayPal donate button, which, by the way, to everybody
who's who's donated through PayPal, thank you very much if

(01:14:13):
it's anything for a while, and I apologize it's awesome.
We appreciate that greatly. There's gonna be a couple other
places that you're gonna find us. Most people people are
probably not listening on our website. They're gonna be listening
through iTunes. If you are using iTunes, please take the
time to leave a rating and subscribe because those ratings

(01:14:34):
are what help other people find us, move us up
through the charts. Right a review too, if you don't mind, Yeah,
that'd be awesome. Yeah. Um, well, we probably made a
budget people hill today, so probably don't want them to
review it. After that this, there are gonna be a
number of streaming sites and apps that you can listen
to us as well through. If you don't use iTunes,

(01:14:56):
there's a whole bunch of them. Just look us up
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and that is Thinking Sideways without the g We do

(01:15:20):
tweet occasionally, and we're really good about tweeting back, aren't
we yea as Devon is doing Twitter. We also have
our email address, so if you have thoughts, comments, concerns,
story suggestions, or you have another theory, or you think
you've got we got something wrong and you want us

(01:15:42):
to know about it, or Steve mispronounced a bunch of
words which Steve's gonna know he does, and Steve is
now talking about Steve and the third person, which is
extremely weird, you can send us an email at Thinking
Sideways Podcast at gmail com. I believe that is all
of the good information that we have to share with

(01:16:04):
these good folks, So it's we mentioned merch. So I
think it is time for us to close this one
out to lafel Is sick really, Bye guys, Bye guys,