PHE: Be an Invalid For those of our readers who are not familiar with , what are its main PHE: Be an Invalid For those of our readers who are not familiar with , what are its main points?

RC: I first began to think about writing on Darwin in 1959, I noticed that the many RC: I first began to think about writing on Darwin in 1959, I noticed that the many biographies of him had little to say about the causes and nature of the illness that dominated his life. There was, for instance, no delineation of what his clinical symptoms were. After I decided to write on his illness, I spent many years researching unpublished Darwin documents. (It took To Be an Invalid me several years to learn to decipher his handwriting.) In I published the first comprehensive account of his illness. I showed that as a youth he suffered brief psychosomatic symptoms from transient mental stresses, and as an adult he suffered protracted psychosomatic illness mainly from working on his controversial theory of evolution. When his theory was accepted and he stopped working on it, his illness became better. While his physical symptoms were mainly flatulence, vomiting, and eczema, he also had a variety of other psychiatric symptoms -- obsessions, anxieties, and depressions -- and psychosomatic symptoms -- headaches, cardiac palpitations, trembling, and altered sensations. I also stressed that with the absence of current methods of diagnosis, much about the nature of his illness remains uncertain. My book filled a gap, and was very well received by other Darwin scholars.

Now I am working on a second edition of the book. It is really a new book that incorporates the great amount of new primary source information on Darwin -- published and unpublished -- that has become available since 1977. In it I will delineate more ful ly the clinical nature of Darwin's symptoms and their causation. I will also raise the possibility of arrested Chagas' disease of the stomach, which can lead to all sorts of stomach disorders, making Darwin more sensitive to psychological stress. The res ult will be a more precise picture of Darwin's illness and a more intimate portrait of Darwin the man.

As an appendix to it, I am including Darwin's 'Diary of Health' which was a unique daily diary that he kept from 1849-1855, in which he put down his symptoms, and for several years his main treatment of hydropathy (treating illness by external douching with cold water) and how it affected him. The 'Diary of Health' is a unique medical and psychological document that has never been transcribed. [A photocopy of the original manuscript is shown.]

Together with the Darwin biographer Jim Moore, I hope to someday do an annotated edition of Darwin's autobiography. It would be along the lines of the annotated autobiography of Benjamin Franklin. Now that I am in my 70s, I am interested in what it was like for Darwin in his latter years. I might want to publish something on them, based upon the approach of Daniel Levinson's Seasons of a Man's Life (1978). Levinson stopped at age 65 and his approach needs to be taken to the latter years. I sense now that Darwin studies are burgeoning more than ever. His complete correspondence is being published and the second part of a two-volume biography is coming out soon. An important biography of Darwin the botanist is in the making -- it includes insight into some of the areas of his greatest creativity. When I correspond with other Darwin scholars and they ask