My Son the Doctor

Can the disappointed father speaking above be excused for his remark? To our modern day sensibility he certainly sounds like his love for his son is anything but unconditional. Indeed, the father comes off as not only disheartened, but also vicious.

What could cause a father to make such a mean-spirited remark? It is hard to read “you will be a disgrace to yourself and all your family” as supportive and nurturing. It seems unlikely that this father hoping to evoke positive change in his son.

Would you be more sympathetic if you knew that dad had just learned that his son had been deceiving him? Here’s some more of the story to help you decide whether the above remarks were helpful or harsh, merited or unwarranted.

The son to whom the angry father is speaking has just come home from Edinburgh where, as it turns out, he had NOT been studying medicine for the past two years. The young man had instead been hanging out with a zoologist, dissecting not cadavers but marine animals, looking not at humans cells under the microscope but at seaweed.

The young man was terrified to communicate to his dad that he just wasn’t cut out to study medicine or to be a doctor. He put off the disclosure as long as he could. When the time came and the secret could no longer be kept, the young man admitted that he was not studying medicine and would not study medicine. The father was outraged and suggested that his son’s passions extended only to dogs and rat-catching.

What happened subsequently to the young man is better known. There were some family resources. The young man’s father was a prosperous doctor and his mother’s side had some money from their connection to Wedgwood china. Indeed, the young man’s mother was a Wedgwood. So, without the blessing of his father, the young man went to sea.

Perhaps you have heard of the young man whose doctor father predicted he would be “a disgrace to yourself and all your family.” His interest in zoology persisted on the five-year voyage of the 90-foot sailing ship that left England in 1831. It is unlikely that you know anything about the father, Robert Darwin, the disappointed doctor. But you probable have heard of his son Charles, whose legacy is fairly well regarded in some circles. It is my understanding that the young man’s name still comes up in college courses from time to time.

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So let’s get on the right side of history on this one, shall we?

There never has been and there never will be a parade through town for parents who communicated that their children just didn’t measure up. Go to the post office and look through all the stamps. You won’t find one that says, “My kids weren’t who I wanted them to be so I told them to get out.” No engraving beneath a statue in the park proclaims, “I thought my children were worthless little shits and I told them so.”

Can you imagine our world without our understanding of natural selection? Life saving antibiotics are a direct consequence of our insight into how organisms change. Without Darwin’s Origin of Species, there might be even more folks who believe that the Earth came into being some 6000 years ago with civilizations and people already on it. It would be hard to exaggerate the influence of Charles Darwin on civilization.

Can you imagine our world had Robert Darwin been successful in trying to change his son? Can you imagine a world in which Charles Darwin had been forced to be a doctor?

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I am indebted to Carl Zimmer, Stephen Jay Gould, and Evolution: The Triumph of an Idea to which any cogent ideas in this essay may be attributed.