Classic Text No. 128: Thomas Brown’s comments on Erasmus Darwin’s view on madness

In his book Observations on the Zoonomia of Erasmus Darwin MD, Thomas Brown included a critical chapter on the analysis of madness proposed by Darwin in Zoonomia. Although neither Darwin nor Brown are ground-breaking in their views on madness, they illustrate the transitional accounts of madness that were being entertained at the end of the eighteenth century, particularly among writers who had studied at Edinburgh University.

A Walk on the Wild Side: Steps towards an ecological arts pedagogy

between home and school walking a way to learning life through the city. (David Haley) This article takes the reader for a stroll through a programme of ecological arts-led, performance-based research. The style is more poetic than scientific, although much ecological science is embedded within the art form. Indeed, Charles Darwin was known for his regular walks, as time and space for his reflections on evolution and his grandfather Erasmus Darwin was noted for the poetic form of his scientific treatises. Here also, the author breaks with academic convention to engage with walking and research as creative activities to deal with ecological issues. Of course, other artists like Richard Long and Hamish Fulton have walked as part of their practice, and there are a growing number of artists who consider walking as practice-as-research. In this article, the focus is specifically on walking as a creative form of inquiry, through community participation within urban contexts to create a critical dialogue focused on ecology in action.

Creation after Reproduction

This chapter locates Mark Akenside at a point where counter-materialist theology and poetic theory weirdly converge with speculative embryology. The poet and physician held that human beings break into a new category of existence as they advance to an immaterial state, but normal sexual reproduction extends material life as it is. According to Akenside’s MD dissertation, God and the mother do all the work in the latter process and sperm have no functional role to play. His poetry compensates for this picture of men alienated from reproductive futurity, the chapter argues, by assigning certain male poets a power that was often (and notoriously) seen as maternal: they can impress their imaginations on the bodies and minds of other people and so steer humanity toward a different kind of future. The chapter culminates in an extended comparison to Erasmus Darwin, another poet-physician trained in embryology and, as it happens, another rare theorist of the power of paternal impressions.

Joseph Wright of Derby and Dr Erasmus Darwin, the artist and his physician

In 1767 at the time of his great “candlelight” paintings of science and the Enlightenment, The Orrery and The Air-Pump, Wright of Derby developed the illness that plagued him for the rest of his life and became a patient and life-long friend of Dr Erasmus Darwin. Wright’s recorded complaints and the periodicity are highly suggestive of the major depressive illness, seasonal affective disorder.