When we come to look for the cause of Darwin’s troubles, it is evident that at this distance of time we can hardly get a clear enough account of the symptoms and the conditions to conjecture with great definiteness, though the enlarged medical knowledge of to-day might interpret matters that were then obscure. There was sometimes a disposition to attribute the whole recurring misery of later years to the Beagle sea-sickness. But Darwin himself rejected this explanation and his son points out that the settled illness came on only gradually some years after his return.[262] Darwin believed that his bad health was due ‘to the hereditary fault which came out as gout in some of the past generations.’[263] The specialists of that day were quite at sea. ‘Dr. Brinton has been here,’ says Darwin; ‘he does not believe my brain or heart primarily affected, but I have been so steadily going down hill, I cannot help doubting whether I can ever crawl a little uphill again.’[264] It is amusing to see how later speculators have exercised their wits upon the case. Dr. George M. Gould, in his brilliant ‘Biographic Clinics,’ grouped Darwin with Huxley, Tennyson, Browning, and a dozen others, as a victim of eye-strain, and believed all his trouble could have been disposed of by properly refracting glasses. With the development of glandular theories, Darwin’s thyroid, pituitary, and adrenal secretions have been set down as excessive or deficient. With his build, he would certainly have been a promising subject for the experiments of the orthopædist, while the dietitian would have prescribed unlimited spinach and carrots, the osteopath would have discovered disastrous subluxations in the spine, and the psycho-analyst would see the foundation of the whole trouble in disordered complexes. And all of them would have some symptomatic justification, and all of them would have been eager to work over the poor man, as they have done over many another such, with mountains of expectation and promise and outlay, and too often a pitiful mouse of result. Fortunately, or unfortunately, the specialist was not quite so rampant in Darwin’s day, and while later scientific developments might, or might not, have cured him, he escaped a good deal of unprofitable discomfort. The water cure was fashionable at that time and he was duly put through it, with some annoyance, and perhaps with a little improvement: ‘One most singular effect of the treatment is that it induces in most people, and eminently in my case, the most complete stagnation of mind. I have ceased to think even of barnacles.’[265]