title: Creative Malady
abstract: In this highly provocative book, originally published in 1974, Sir George Pickering, former Professor of Medicine in the University of London and Regius Professor in the University of Oxford, examines the role of illness in the minds and lives of Charles Darwin, Florence Nightingale, Freud, Proust, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Mary Baker Eddy. At the age of twenty-six Darwin returned from the voyage of the Beagle a vigorous young naturalist. Within two years he became a recluse and so remained