- Email: [email protected]
A cinematic celebration of Charles Darwin
Perspectives
Film A cinematic celebration of Charles Darwin
www.thelancet.com Vol 374 September 12, 2009
Darwin and some wonderful wildlife photography (thanks no doubt to the involvement of BBC Films in the production). The imagined Down House is even grander than the real thing. Its owners were an uxorious couple (as Charles wrote when his wife was in her forties “Emma has been very neglectful of late for we have not had a child for more than one whole year”) and there
“Even so, Creation is a marvellous celebration of the life of the greatest of all biologists in this his bicentennial year. Every creationist should see it.” are hints of that here. Queen Victoria would have been less than amused by the bedroom scenes, although she might be placated to learn that the two main characters are husband and wife in real life. Darwin’s own illness is blamed on their religious incompatibility, with no mention of the possibility of Chagas’ disease picked up in South America, of his heavy smoking and snuff addiction, or—given that most of the inhabitants of the house spent much of their time throwing up—of a rather too close proximity of septic
tank and well. He was diagnosed with “waterbrash”—in modern parlance, acid reflux. His treatments would not now make it past The Lancet’s referees, for they featured cold showers and Condy’s Ozonised Fluid (whatever that might be). On April 19, 1882, Emma made a succinct note in her diary: “Fatal attack”. Her husband was dead. Creation makes rather more of the demise of poor Annie, with a drawn-out deathbed scene and a dubious resurrection of her infant self in its closing moments as On the Origin of Species goes off to the publishers. Tragic as her loss no doubt was, its treatment is a reminder of Oscar Wilde’s comment on Charles Dickens’ The Old Curiosity Shop that “one must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing”. Like almost all films, this one is 20 minutes too long. It packs in too much: the Fuegian children, playing the mouth-organ to Jenny, the orangutan, and mythical embryos coming to life in their bottles. Even so, Creation is a marvellous celebration of the life of the greatest of all biologists in this his bicentennial year. Every creationist should see it.
Creation Directed by Jon Amiel, produced by Jeremy Thomas. Starring Paul Bettany, Jennifer Connelly. Icon Films/BBC Films, 2009. http://www.creationthemovie. com. Creation will open in cinemas in the UK from Sept 25, 2009.
Icon Films
The Darwin anniversary do in Cambridge a couple of months ago generated plenty of technical language, not all of it familiar to biologists. Hermeneutics and eschatology got a look-in, as did exegesis and Christography. But why? Charles Darwin was a scientist rather than a theologian and the crystalline logic of that discipline, unlike that of biology, does not scatter X-rays. Although there were some excellent talks on modern evolution, it was often hard to escape a certain odour of sanctity that lingered, perhaps, from the days when the great naturalist himself had made plans to become a clergyman. Creation is rather the same. The film explores—clearly and effectively—the genesis of Darwin’s ideas, but spends rather too much of its time on the religious conflict between Charles and his wife Emma. The story is balanced around the death of their beloved 10-year-old daughter Annie and on the naturalist’s final loss of faith soon afterwards. The film is beautifully shot (although it does feature rainstorms and blowing leaves of the kind never seen in real life) and the performances are well acted. Paul Bettany has an uncanny resemblance to Darwin himself in early middle age, while Jennifer Connelly is perhaps rather too decorative in the role of Emma, whose favourite meals as revealed in her recently published cook-book included a Nesselrode Pudding of heavy cream, brandy, and ground almonds (not to speak of Turnips Cresselly). The other main characters are impressively faithful to their originals with Joseph Hooker suitably ascetic and T H Huxley, Darwin’s bulldog, as squat and loathsome in appearance and behaviour as one would expect of an adherent of what later became Imperial College London. There are plenty of quotations from
869
Perspectives
Creation, entertaining as it is, stumbles into the intellectual pitfall already well populated by those with that odd belief, together with a gaggle of metaphysicians and the like: that evolution is more than a science. I was not long ago asked at a public meeting “Why are we here?” The best I could come up with was that I had no idea why we are here, but I imagined that I was there because the organisers could not afford Richard Dawkins. That got a cheap laugh but
makes a serious point. Science has no concern with such issues, for it has more interesting matters to address. Unlike theology, it occupies itself with answering questions rather than merely asking them. When it comes to what science can explain, the great evolutionist J B S Haldane came up with a rational explanation of the odour of sanctity— the sweet fragrance on the breath of a dying and ascetic saint came, he suggested, from acid ketosis: the
presence of acetone as the starving body turns upon itself for nutrition. Strangely enough, the philosophers at Cambridge did not come up with a single notion remotely as interesting as that. They—and many others— would learn a lot from Creation, particularly if they ignore the smells and bells and concentrate on the biology.
Steve Jones [email protected]
In brief Book Eye-opening anecdotes
Carrying the Heart: Exploring the Worlds Within Us F Gonzalez-Crussi. Kaplan Publishing, 2009. Pp 304. US$26·95. ISBN 1-60714-072-1.
870
Medical school teaches us “the facts” about the body’s internal organs: how actin and myosin fibrils interlock, how the liver metabolises drugs, how the sympathetic and parasympathetic nerves complement each other, how the B cells release antibodies, how follicles mature within the ovaries. Most of these facts, though, are of relatively recent vintage and their provenance is related to available technology. Human beings, however, have been debating the inner workings of the body since the dawn of consciousness, and the staggering variety of beliefs is both illuminating and amusing. In Carrying the Heart: Exploring the World Within Us, F Gonzalez-Crussi, a retired pathologist, seeks to reflect on some of the more colourful beliefs. Each of the book’s five sections—Digestive, Scatology, Respiratory, Reproductive, and Cardiovascular—offer eyeopening anecdotes from the past. For centuries, the stomach was felt to be the supreme organ that ruled all other organs. But nobody had any idea how food was digested. This changed when Alexis St Martin, a French-Canadian fur trader, was accidentally shot in the abdomen in 1822 at the American border. The blast removed his abdominal
muscles and ruptured his gut, and he was expected to die of peritonitis. Somehow his body managed to fibrose a protective channel from his viscera to his abdominal wall, creating a natural gastrostomy. The physician, Dr William Beaumont, saw immense opportunity and offered to support the now unemployed St Martin in exchange for allowing digestive experiments. For the next decade, the good doctor inserted various concoctions and measuring devices into the orifices of his patient until he was finally able to publish a major treatise on digestion. The relationship increasingly bordered on indentured servitude, even outright slavery, as St Martin escaped and was brought back several times. This vivid example serves to remind readers how medical knowledge was developed at great cost to many patients, usually without consent. Gonzalez-Crussi also observes, in the Reproductive section, that erectile tissue exists in the nasal mucosa and follows the work of Dr Wilhelm Fleiss who attempted numerous clinical endeavours based on this little-known anatomical fact. Fleiss was referred many patients from his colleague Sigmund Freud. Fleiss observed many spots of nasal inflammation in these patients with disorders of
sexual function. When he treated the inflammation with intranasal cocaine, the patients felt remarkably improved. His nasal bone extractions to relieve sexual dysfunction did not end so satisfactorily. The Cardiovascular section traces the development of the heart as the seat of passion. Following that is the assortment of legends in diverse cultures of adulterers being forced to eat the heart of their (former) lovers. Then we see how the modern culture of cardiac transplants has jettisoned the heart’s mysterious meanings—it’s now just a pump that can exist in one body as easily as another. Carrying the Heart is well researched and written in a folksy style that has more Oxbridge flavour than I might have expected from a writer who was raised in Mexico and practised medicine in the USA. The prose is occasionally bogged down with florid language, but I learned many amazing things. By helping to place our current understanding of medical knowledge in a thoughtful perspective, Carrying the Heart is an important addition to the medical canon.
Danielle Ofri Department of Medicine, New York University School of Medicine, New York, NY 10016, USA
www.thelancet.com Vol 374 September 12, 2009
Film A cinematic celebration of Charles Darwin
www.thelancet.com Vol 374 September 12, 2009
Darwin and some wonderful wildlife photography (thanks no doubt to the involvement of BBC Films in the production). The imagined Down House is even grander than the real thing. Its owners were an uxorious couple (as Charles wrote when his wife was in her forties “Emma has been very neglectful of late for we have not had a child for more than one whole year”) and there
“Even so, Creation is a marvellous celebration of the life of the greatest of all biologists in this his bicentennial year. Every creationist should see it.” are hints of that here. Queen Victoria would have been less than amused by the bedroom scenes, although she might be placated to learn that the two main characters are husband and wife in real life. Darwin’s own illness is blamed on their religious incompatibility, with no mention of the possibility of Chagas’ disease picked up in South America, of his heavy smoking and snuff addiction, or—given that most of the inhabitants of the house spent much of their time throwing up—of a rather too close proximity of septic
tank and well. He was diagnosed with “waterbrash”—in modern parlance, acid reflux. His treatments would not now make it past The Lancet’s referees, for they featured cold showers and Condy’s Ozonised Fluid (whatever that might be). On April 19, 1882, Emma made a succinct note in her diary: “Fatal attack”. Her husband was dead. Creation makes rather more of the demise of poor Annie, with a drawn-out deathbed scene and a dubious resurrection of her infant self in its closing moments as On the Origin of Species goes off to the publishers. Tragic as her loss no doubt was, its treatment is a reminder of Oscar Wilde’s comment on Charles Dickens’ The Old Curiosity Shop that “one must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing”. Like almost all films, this one is 20 minutes too long. It packs in too much: the Fuegian children, playing the mouth-organ to Jenny, the orangutan, and mythical embryos coming to life in their bottles. Even so, Creation is a marvellous celebration of the life of the greatest of all biologists in this his bicentennial year. Every creationist should see it.
Creation Directed by Jon Amiel, produced by Jeremy Thomas. Starring Paul Bettany, Jennifer Connelly. Icon Films/BBC Films, 2009. http://www.creationthemovie. com. Creation will open in cinemas in the UK from Sept 25, 2009.
Icon Films
The Darwin anniversary do in Cambridge a couple of months ago generated plenty of technical language, not all of it familiar to biologists. Hermeneutics and eschatology got a look-in, as did exegesis and Christography. But why? Charles Darwin was a scientist rather than a theologian and the crystalline logic of that discipline, unlike that of biology, does not scatter X-rays. Although there were some excellent talks on modern evolution, it was often hard to escape a certain odour of sanctity that lingered, perhaps, from the days when the great naturalist himself had made plans to become a clergyman. Creation is rather the same. The film explores—clearly and effectively—the genesis of Darwin’s ideas, but spends rather too much of its time on the religious conflict between Charles and his wife Emma. The story is balanced around the death of their beloved 10-year-old daughter Annie and on the naturalist’s final loss of faith soon afterwards. The film is beautifully shot (although it does feature rainstorms and blowing leaves of the kind never seen in real life) and the performances are well acted. Paul Bettany has an uncanny resemblance to Darwin himself in early middle age, while Jennifer Connelly is perhaps rather too decorative in the role of Emma, whose favourite meals as revealed in her recently published cook-book included a Nesselrode Pudding of heavy cream, brandy, and ground almonds (not to speak of Turnips Cresselly). The other main characters are impressively faithful to their originals with Joseph Hooker suitably ascetic and T H Huxley, Darwin’s bulldog, as squat and loathsome in appearance and behaviour as one would expect of an adherent of what later became Imperial College London. There are plenty of quotations from
869
Perspectives
Creation, entertaining as it is, stumbles into the intellectual pitfall already well populated by those with that odd belief, together with a gaggle of metaphysicians and the like: that evolution is more than a science. I was not long ago asked at a public meeting “Why are we here?” The best I could come up with was that I had no idea why we are here, but I imagined that I was there because the organisers could not afford Richard Dawkins. That got a cheap laugh but
makes a serious point. Science has no concern with such issues, for it has more interesting matters to address. Unlike theology, it occupies itself with answering questions rather than merely asking them. When it comes to what science can explain, the great evolutionist J B S Haldane came up with a rational explanation of the odour of sanctity— the sweet fragrance on the breath of a dying and ascetic saint came, he suggested, from acid ketosis: the
presence of acetone as the starving body turns upon itself for nutrition. Strangely enough, the philosophers at Cambridge did not come up with a single notion remotely as interesting as that. They—and many others— would learn a lot from Creation, particularly if they ignore the smells and bells and concentrate on the biology.
Steve Jones [email protected]
In brief Book Eye-opening anecdotes
Carrying the Heart: Exploring the Worlds Within Us F Gonzalez-Crussi. Kaplan Publishing, 2009. Pp 304. US$26·95. ISBN 1-60714-072-1.
870
Medical school teaches us “the facts” about the body’s internal organs: how actin and myosin fibrils interlock, how the liver metabolises drugs, how the sympathetic and parasympathetic nerves complement each other, how the B cells release antibodies, how follicles mature within the ovaries. Most of these facts, though, are of relatively recent vintage and their provenance is related to available technology. Human beings, however, have been debating the inner workings of the body since the dawn of consciousness, and the staggering variety of beliefs is both illuminating and amusing. In Carrying the Heart: Exploring the World Within Us, F Gonzalez-Crussi, a retired pathologist, seeks to reflect on some of the more colourful beliefs. Each of the book’s five sections—Digestive, Scatology, Respiratory, Reproductive, and Cardiovascular—offer eyeopening anecdotes from the past. For centuries, the stomach was felt to be the supreme organ that ruled all other organs. But nobody had any idea how food was digested. This changed when Alexis St Martin, a French-Canadian fur trader, was accidentally shot in the abdomen in 1822 at the American border. The blast removed his abdominal
muscles and ruptured his gut, and he was expected to die of peritonitis. Somehow his body managed to fibrose a protective channel from his viscera to his abdominal wall, creating a natural gastrostomy. The physician, Dr William Beaumont, saw immense opportunity and offered to support the now unemployed St Martin in exchange for allowing digestive experiments. For the next decade, the good doctor inserted various concoctions and measuring devices into the orifices of his patient until he was finally able to publish a major treatise on digestion. The relationship increasingly bordered on indentured servitude, even outright slavery, as St Martin escaped and was brought back several times. This vivid example serves to remind readers how medical knowledge was developed at great cost to many patients, usually without consent. Gonzalez-Crussi also observes, in the Reproductive section, that erectile tissue exists in the nasal mucosa and follows the work of Dr Wilhelm Fleiss who attempted numerous clinical endeavours based on this little-known anatomical fact. Fleiss was referred many patients from his colleague Sigmund Freud. Fleiss observed many spots of nasal inflammation in these patients with disorders of
sexual function. When he treated the inflammation with intranasal cocaine, the patients felt remarkably improved. His nasal bone extractions to relieve sexual dysfunction did not end so satisfactorily. The Cardiovascular section traces the development of the heart as the seat of passion. Following that is the assortment of legends in diverse cultures of adulterers being forced to eat the heart of their (former) lovers. Then we see how the modern culture of cardiac transplants has jettisoned the heart’s mysterious meanings—it’s now just a pump that can exist in one body as easily as another. Carrying the Heart is well researched and written in a folksy style that has more Oxbridge flavour than I might have expected from a writer who was raised in Mexico and practised medicine in the USA. The prose is occasionally bogged down with florid language, but I learned many amazing things. By helping to place our current understanding of medical knowledge in a thoughtful perspective, Carrying the Heart is an important addition to the medical canon.
Danielle Ofri Department of Medicine, New York University School of Medicine, New York, NY 10016, USA
www.thelancet.com Vol 374 September 12, 2009