Abstract

Charles Darwin "had medicine in his blood" (Bynum 1983). His father and grandfather were physicians, and he himself studied medicine. Although Darwin left medical school after two years and did not become a physician, he retained a strong interest in medicine and regularly used examples drawn from human biology and medicine in his writings. Clearly, he believed that medicine fell within the purview of his theory of evolution, and he recognized the ways in which the study of evolution and of medicine could be mutually enriching. In The Descent of Man (1871), Darwin argued that humans, like other species, have evolved from earlier, ancestral species. "Descent with modification," Darwin's term for evolution, accounts ..