Charles Wells & Erasmus Darwin: The Dueling ‘Vertiginous Philosophers’

By Christopher Zalewski

This article is a part of the January/February 2019, Volume 31, Number 1, Audiology Today issue.

Preamble

The following historical summary could not have been possible without two literary works from Nicholas Wade and Benjamin Tatler: Destined for Distinguished Oblivion: The Scientific Writings of William Charles Wells (Wade, 2003) and The Moving Tablet of the Eye: The Origins of Modern Eye Movement Research (Wade and Tatler, 2005).

This article is a synopsis of many literary sources, but I wanted to highlight these works because much of this synopsis was possible due to the authors’ extensive research of the events that surrounded Charles Wells’s scientific life.

The title of this summary is also a play on words from a work by one of my favorite authors, Sam Kean, and his book discussing the historical perspective on human neurology, titled The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons: The History of the Human Brain as Revealed by True Stories of Trauma, Madness, and Recovery. I thought the dueling tale of Darwin versus Wells was incredibly reminiscent of Sam Kean’s perspective on the history of medical science.

If you’re ever in the mood for a terrific read, all of these sources would certainly have my recommendation.

An Unsung Hero

Although Charles Robert Darwin (1809–1882) is recognized universally as the father of evolution and natural selection, largely due to his 1859 work On the Origin of Species, public acknowledgment is seldom given to Alfred Russel Wallace (1823–1913). Wallace was instrumental in the independent conceptualization and propagation of the original framework for the theory of natural selection in his papers titled “On the Law Which Has Regulated the Introduction of New Species” (1855) and “On the Tendencies of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely from the Original Type” (1858). The later paper was sent directly to Darwin by Wallace himself a year before the publication of Darwin’s seminal work, On the Origin of Species.

History is full of such misdirection and obscurities. Scientific and philosophical contributions are sometimes largely displaced or, worse yet, inappropriately credited. Scientific discoveries made by recondite unsung heroes who largely have gone unacknowledged are more frequent than one might think. The history of scientific discovery is laced with unheralded heroes who often have been left to fade away between the cracks and creases of the parchment that nearly made them famous.