Charles Darwin* Read Free Page B

regular Sunday nature walks to fishing villages on the Firth of Forth, examining tide pools, looking for interesting shells and stones, buying oysters covered with tiny creatures to dissect.
    But as for medical school—not much to like. At Edinburgh, the professors’ income depended on how many students signed up for their courses, which meant that classes were like popularity contests. Teachers competed and feuded with each other in unscholarly ways. Classes were noisy free-for-alls, with students stamping their feet to show agreement, hooting their disapproval, using trumpets and peashooters when particularly irked.
    Darwin was highly critical of most of his professors. One was “so very learned that his wisdom has left no room for his sense.” Of another he wrote, “I dislike him and his Lectures so much that I cannot speak with decency about them.” The classes themselves—anatomy, surgery, midwifery, chemistry, materia medica (today’s pharmacology), and natural history—he either found “intolerably dull” or dismissed as “useless.”
    Visits to the operating theater traumatized him. Patients screamed in agony as amputations and other procedures were performed without anesthetic. The most upsetting was when the patient was a child—witnessing such operations “haunted” him for years. For the rest of his life, the sight of blood made him severely sick to his stomach.
    He unenthusiastically passed his courses, but it was a lot more satisfying to be outside in the fresh air, collecting, riding. Also, he took up shooting with a vengeance, so eager that he kept his special hunting boots by his bedside, ready to go at a moment’s notice. In an odd (for someone who loved nature) but utterly fashionable way, he was an avid hunter—rabbits, rats, pigeons, partridges, pheasants—killing as many as three animals a day.
    He did spend time at Edinburgh University’s natural history museum, one of the best in Europe. He made friends with John Edmonstone, a freed black slave who mounted specimens there. Edmonstone was someone Darwin greatly admired, and from him he took private lessons in taxidermy, the art of preserving and stuffing dead animals.
    He also liked his chemistry teacher, the popular Thomas Charles Hope. The brothers had outgrown the lab, which had turned back into a toolshed. But chemistry still intrigued them, and they both fell for Hope’s showmanship. Hope attracted classes as large as five hundred for his highly visual lectures, conducting experiments with equipment so expensive he did not allow students to touch it. So the class was all talk, no hands-on experimentation.
    After a year of medical school, the most important thing seventeen-year-old Darwin had learned was this: he did not want to be a doctor. He was interested in everything in nature except the human body. To avoid an argument, he kept this news from his father. Another reason for his silence was money: he now had a clearer understanding about just how rich his father was. Darwin realized he would probably never have to work for a living, much less practice medicine, if he didn’t want to. So there was no reason to make waves.
    Thus he dutifully returned to Edinburgh for his second year, without Ras, who was off to attend a school of anatomy in London.
    This year Charles avoided corpses and blood as much as possible. He missed Ras, but he started hanging out with other students, got new calling cards, and became very fashionable. Darwin even started to take snuff (smokeless tobacco sniffed through the nose). He joined the Plinian Natural History Society, named for Pliny the Elder, an ancient Roman with vast interests, who had written a famous natural history of Rome. It was a science club—favoring botany, geology, zoology—that met in an underground room to read and discuss papers. The club had been founded by Robert Jameson, a noted professor of geology, a few years earlier.
    Jameson had translated the works of French