ABSTRACT
On the eve of sailing aboard the Beagle, Darwin saw, in a flash of intuition, that the voyage was, for him, a new birth, the beginning of a "second life." A few years after his return, however, Darwin, then in his late twenties, began to exhibit distressing symptoms that remained with him in varying degrees of intensity for the rest of his life: palpitations of the heart, gastric and intestinal pains, fatigue and lethargy, shivering spells, and insomnia. Thus almost all of his creative work was done in a state of illness, Darwin remaining quietly at his country home in Down, cared for by his devoted wife, Emma, and able to work in sustained fashion for only a few hours a day. His "second life," therefore, was characterized by chronic invalidism.
