james moore eloge ralph colp isis sept. 2010

Eloge: Ralph Colp, 1924–2008Author(s): James MooreSource: Isis, Vol. 101, No. 3 (September 2010), pp. 599-602Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of The History of Science SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/655798Accessed: 22-08-2017 17:21 UTC

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NEWS OF THE PROFESSION

Eloges

RALPH COLP, 1924–2008

Ralph Colp knew Charles Darwin. For half acentury, until Colp’s death on the day before hiseighty-fourth birthday, no living person wasmore intimately in touch with the body andmind of the iconic scientist of our age. One mustgo back to 1925, when Darwin’s son Franciswas alive, or indeed to 1896, before his wifeEmma’s death, to find a person who knew moreof the fine texture of Charles Darwin’s personalexistence than Ralph Colp.

He was born on 12 October 1924, the only

child of Miriam Mirsky, a graduate-educatedbiologist whose father was born in Russia, andDr. Ralph Colp, a wealthy and prominent NewYork surgeon of German-Jewish descent. RalphColp, Jr. (as he insisted, to distance himselffrom his formidable father, whose shadow hefelt throughout his life), followed his parents toManhattan’s Ethical Culture schools and after-ward to Columbia University, where he receiveda bachelor’s degree and the M.D. in 1948. Heperformed surgery at Mt. Sinai Hospital in New

Photo by courtesy of Paul H. Elovitz.

Isis, 2010, 101:599–614©2010 by The History of Science Society. All rights reserved.0020-9903/2010/1013-0009$10.00

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York City and then with the Air Force in Ger-many for two years before moving into psychi-atry in 1956, training as a resident at the Mas-sachusetts Mental Health Center and at St.Luke’s Hospital and Hillside Hospital in NewYork. Years of supervised casework, rather thanformal coursework, were Colp’s making as apsychotherapist, and his own analysis startedwith Max Schur, Freud’s last physician, in No-vember 1959 and continued until Schur’s sud-den death on 12 October 1969.

During that decade, Colp became a diplomateof the American Board of Psychiatry and Neu-rology, and, after joining the clinical psychiatryfaculty at Columbia, he counseled graduate stu-dents and supervised residents in the MentalHealth Division, acting as its director for a timeand conducting seminars on identity formation.While at Columbia, until 1993, Colp also servedas a senior attending psychiatrist at St. Luke’s–Roosevelt Hospital Center, and in the 1970s hebecame a senior associate in the Program ofHuman Sexuality and Sex Therapy at the NewYork University Medical Center. He maintaineda private psychiatric practice in Manhattan, withmany of his patients seeking sex therapy. In atypical act of generosity, Colp donated his bodyto Columbia’s Medical Center to assist the train-ing of young doctors. Several rooms of his EastSide apartment held an extensive library, and inhis archives were drawer upon drawer of filesbursting with Darwin research materials and alifetime’s correspondence with Darwin scholars,scientists, and historians from around the world.Sadly, immediately after his death from prostatecancer on 11 October 2008, all his personalpapers, including a Darwin book manuscript andall other Darwin-related materials, were appar-ently destroyed—an incalculable loss to the his-tory of science. He is survived by his wife, thepulmonologist Dr. Charlotte Colp, and theirdaughters Ruth and Judith.

Colp’s extraordinary empathy for Darwin—the salient feature of his scholarship—grew outof a longing to know the man personally. In the1930s Colp’s vivacious mother, divorced andremarried, had turned their New York home intosomething of a salon, buzzing with intellectuallife, and Ralph—“Tommy” to his family andfriends—had grown up debating all the latestscience history and politics with academicsand doctors. One of them was his uncle, themolecular biologist Alfred Mirsky (then at theRockefeller Institute for Medical Research andpublishing on protein structure with Linus Pau-ling), who introduced him to Darwin’s life andwork. In the 1940s, Colp’s high school biologyteacher declared that no one believed in Darwin-

ism any more, but Darwin’s name kept comingup in conversation, and this convinced the in-quisitive Colp that, like the great politicians whofascinated him—Lincoln and Lenin, Trotskyand Stalin—Darwin would have a permanentplace in history. Framed portraits of Darwin,Freud, Huxley, Lister, and Pasteur hung inRalph Colp, Sr.’s, office. To his radical son theybecame scientific heroes, nobler than the class ofNew York doctors who practiced medicine as abusiness.

Colp’s intense curiosity about Darwin grewwith his professional training. He came tounderstand bodily suffering and learned totreat pains and complaints by surgery. Butfrom childhood he was a listener, and at bed-sides he heard how the mind suffered, over-whelming the body. He found that gettingpatients to open up, instead of opening themup, helped relieve their distress. By the age ofthirty-five, Colp had found his metier. In thatyear, 1959, he finished his psychiatric resi-dency, his first child was born, and, on thesame day, he went into analysis with Schur.Three weeks later, the sesquicentenary of theOrigin of Species deposited Darwin on Colp’scouch, as it were; and ever after the doctorwould rise early in the morning to “commune”with his patient.

Darwin was more or less sick for most ofhis adult life, yet Colp noticed that biogra-phies of him had little to say about the natureand causes of his illness. Also in 1959, Colpread Erik Erikson’s groundbreaking psychobi-ography Young Man Luther. Without creditingits contribution to Luther scholarship, he wasstruck by Erikson’s treatment of “identity for-mation” and “identity crisis” in a historical sub-ject. Reading Erikson helped Colp understandthe difference, in listening to patients, betweenbeing an investigator and being a therapist. Hecould never be Darwin’s therapist, but he wouldnow “listen” to him as no doctor had ever done,examining his corpus for the faintest clues to hisemotions and beliefs, his habits and crotchets,and, above all, why he suffered so variously, somiserably, in body and mind, for so long.

For more than fifty years, Colp produced asteady stream of articles and book reviews, writ-ing as fluently on medical history (including the“History of Psychiatry” section in Kaplan andSadock’s Comprehensive Textbook of Psychiatry)and medical biography (Ernest Starling, WilliamHalsted) as on political biography (Russian revo-lutionaries, Bartolomeo Vanzetti) and Darwin.In the 1980s he became an early member of theNew York–based Psychohistory Forum; he wasa major contributor to its “Communism: The

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God That Failed” Research Group and its suc-cessor group on psychobiography, and he servedon the editorial board of the forum’s journal,Clio’s Psyche. Its motto, “Psychological andhistorical insights without jargon,” aptly sumsup Colp’s writing. He would speak of the “li-bido” and its investments, but his texts are un-burdened by analytic apparatus, and he could becutting about psycho-biographical a priorism,particularly concerning Darwin. Colp was firstand foremost a clinician, a fact finder and notetaker with a deep grasp of the person as a psy-chosomatic whole. His memory was vast andprecise; he could astonish as much by his effort-less grasp of Darwiniana as by recalling whatwas said in a conversation years earlier. Helistened to friends and patients like he listened toDarwin, intently, sympathetically.

Years before there was a “Darwin industry”to edit the naturalist’s letters and notebooks,Colp was tooth-combing manuscripts for evi-dence of what made the man tick—and sick.Interim reports by Colp from Darwin’s bedside,many published in medical journals and otherperiodicals not frequented by historians of sci-ence, began to appear regularly in the 1970s.Colp wrote on Darwin’s relations with women,including his mother; on his relations with doc-tors, including his father and grandfather; on hisautobiographical reflections, his dreams, hisemotional outbursts (Colp was the first to ob-serve that these were often enclosed in paren-theses, such as “it is like confessing a murder”);on his “insufferable grief” at the loss of hisdaughter Annie; on his thoughts about death;and even a piece on the peregrinations of hisfirst, unused coffin. Colp’s political interests randeep and remained constant; no philosophy for-bade his seeing Darwin’s scientific and politicalmilieus in a single vision. He published majorarticles on Darwin’s responses to slavery andthe U.S. Civil War, on his relations with theEnglish statesman W. E. Gladstone, and on hiscontacts with Edward Aveling and Karl Marx.Next to his studies of Darwin’s illness, Colp willbe best remembered by historians for his part inexploding the “myth” that Marx offered to ded-icate part of Capital to Darwin. Independentlyof two other researchers, and in the same year,1975, Colp discovered the letter to whichDarwin had famously replied in 1880, refusing aproposed book dedication: the letter was writtenby Marx’s daughter’s lover, Aveling.1

“I think Darwin’s illness cannot be under-stood without understanding two attributes ofDarwin the man: his determination to winacceptance for his evolutionary theory, andhis anxieties over the difficulties of proving

this theory and over some of its ideologicalconsequences.” Thus magisterially, in 1977,Colp opened To Be an Invalid: The Illness ofCharles Darwin, the most exacting and au-thoritative study of history’s most famous sickscientist until the publication, months beforeColp’s death, of its updated and rewritten suc-cessor, Darwin’s Illness. Colp wrote withclinical rectitude. Darwin’s case history is setdown in chronological order, with evidencefor every passing complaint or persistent con-dition and full details of the patient’s ownremedies and his doctors’ nostrums. Darwin’shydropathic self-treatment from 1849 to 1855was his only extended experiment on a humansubject, and the health diary he kept is metic-ulously transcribed and annotated for the firsttime in Darwin’s Illness. Deciphering Dar-win’s handwriting and cryptic abbreviationsnever ceased to fascinate Colp; for him it wasa filial labor of love. His book concludes witha judicious survey of the theories put forwardto account for Darwin’s kaleidoscopic symp-toms. Colp himself ascribes the disorders toarrested Chagas’s disease plus fluctuatingmental pressures originating in Darwin’s tax-ing work on evolution and other personalstresses.

Neither historian nor philosopher, Colppossessed a doctor’s calm belief in the em-bodied mind, a biographer’s confidence thatreading with informed imagination can reani-mate a historical subject, and a therapist’shabit of assimilating every nuance and detailpresented on the couch. With an eye (and anear) for “trivia,” tell-tale phenomena com-monly overlooked, Colp fashioned himself af-ter Darwin the observer; nor was this their onlyresemblance. Their fathers were rich, imposingdoctors, with Ralph playing a boyhood“Tommy” to Charles’s “Bobby.” They failed asyoung men to follow in their fathers’ footsteps,yet each in his own way acquired a passion forscientific knowledge grounded in patient, persis-tent observation. In Colp’s office hung portraitsof his mentors, Darwin and Freud; in Darwin’sstudy, prints of his scientific friends and family.Like Darwin, Colp did not believe in or practicehis inherited religion. Conscious of these anal-ogies, Ralph cultivated knowing Darwin andbeing like him through the years, even copyingDarwin’s methodical working habits, and in hisfinal months he faced death as Darwin had,stoically. He limited contacts with the outsideworld and, with failing eyesight, he had lovedones read to him, those who had lived with himwhile he lived with Darwin. On the bedside

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table, freely given to visitors, were copies ofDarwin’s Illness.2

JAMES MOORE

Cambridge, England

NOTES1. Echoing Cold War concerns and his polit-

ical engagement since the 1930s, Colp featuredthe story for Left readers in “The Case of the‘Darwin–Marx’ Letter, Lewis Feuer, and En-counter,” Monthly Review, 1981, 32:58–61; helater recounted the whole episode in “The Myth

of the Darwin–Marx Letter,” History of Politi-cal Economy, 1982, 14:461–482.

2. This eloge draws on the interview byPaul H. Elovitz, “A Biographer and His Sub-ject: Ralph Colp and Charles Darwin,” Clio’sPsyche, 2002, 9:61, 114 –123; Elovitz’s mem-oir, “Ralph Colp: Darwin Scholar and Psychi-atrist,” ibid., 2008, 15:105, 160 –162; JamesMoore, “My Friendship with Ralph Colp,”ibid., pp. 162–163; Richard Milner’s inter-view, “Darwin’s Shrink: A Noted Darwin His-torian Probes the Naturalist’s Inner Life,”Natural History, Nov. 2005; and my corre-spondence with Colp since 1977.

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james moore eloge ralph colp isis sept. 2010

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