Book description
When HMS
Beagle
sailed out of Devonport on 27 December 1831, Charles Darwin was
twenty-two and setting off on the voyage of a lifetime. His journal,
here reprinted in a shortened form, shows a naturalist making patient
observations concerning geology, natural history, people, places and
events. Volcanoes in the Galapagos, the Gossamer spider of Patagonia and
the Australasian coral reefs all are to be found in these
extraordinary writings. The insights made here were to set in motion the
intellectual currents that led to the most controversial book of the
Victorian age: The Origin of Species
. Charles Darwin, a Victorian scientist and naturalist, has become one
of the most famous figures of science to date. Born in 1809 to an
upper-middle-class medical family, he was destined for a career in
either medicine or the Anglican Church. However, he never completed his
medical education and his future changed entirely in 1831 when he joined
HMS Beagle
as a self-financing, independent naturalist. On returning to England in
1836 he began to write up his theories and observations which culminated
in a series of books, most famously On the Origin of Species by Means
of Natural Selection
in 1859, where he challenged and contradicted contemporary biological
and religious beliefs with two decades worth of scientific investigation
and theory. Darwin's theory of natural selection is now the most widely
accepted scientific model of how species evolve. He died in 1882 and was
buried in Westminster Abbey. Damien Hirst is an internationally renowned
English artist, who has dominated the art scene in England since the
1990s. Known in particular for his series of works on death, Hirst here
provides a contemporary, visual take on Darwin's theory of evolution -
the struggle between life and death in nature. William Bynum is
Professor Emeritus of the History of Medicine at University College,
London, and was for many years Head of the Academic Unit of the Wellcome
Institute for the History of Medicine. He edited the scholarly journal
Medical History
from 1980 to 2001, and his previous publications include Science and
the Practice of Medicine in the Nineteenth Century
; The Companion Encyclopedia of the History of Medicine
(co-edited with Roy Porter); The Oxford Dictionary of Scientific Quotations
(with Roy Porter), The Dictionary of Medical Biography
(with Helen Bynum), and History of Medicine: A Very Short Introduction
. He lives in Suffolk.
