68 THE BEST PANACEAS FOR HEARTACHES |^ KRISTIN JOHNSON
Billy Sunday was not known for nuance; a
journalist once described a Sunday sermon as
“the most condemnatory, bombastic, ironic and
elemental flaying of a principle or a belief that
[he] ever heard in [his] limited lifetime and career
from drunken fist fights to the halls of congress.”
The contrast Sunday describes is indeed stark: for
someone faced with the death of a child, science
leads to despair and madness, while Christian faith
leads to a deep sense of peace. Though hyperbolic,
Sunday’s condemnation of what he presented as
scientists’ claims to provide both salvation and
solace efficiently—even eloquently—captured
profound, long-standing tensions between the
promises of Western science and the obligations
and goals of Christian faith.
I have taught courses on the history of science
and religion, evolution theory, and medicine for
more than a decade now. But although it is my job
as a historian to try to understand the complex
factors behind positions and beliefs, I never
quite grasped what might be at stake in Sunday’s
belligerent sermon against science—and, indeed,
in the long-running debates among fundamental-
ists, modernists, and atheists—until a few years
ago, when I witnessed the struggles of dear friends
during the illness and loss of their six-month-old
baby girl. Claire was born with a congenital
condition that meant her heart and liver could not
function properly. Surgeons made four attempts to
repair the broken pump, the clogged filter, and the
missing tubing; all ultimately failed.
In many of my classes students learn about
modern science and medicine’s beginnings in
seventeenth-century mechanical philosophy.
Thinking of the body as analogous to a machine
led not only to arguments about God as the De-
signer but also to the idea that broken parts might
be fixed through surgery. That foundation has
led to many of the greatest triumphs of modern
medicine (though, in the intervening centuries,
discussions of “God as the Designer” have receded
from scientific texts). Yet all of this seemed of little
comfort when the doctors could not, in fact, fix
beautiful little Claire’s broken mechanisms.
Amid witnessing doctors’ efforts to preserve
a child’s life, and her devoted parents’ struggle
to understand medicine’s failure, I began paying
more attention to certain biographical facts in thelives of the scientists—and science-watchers—I
read with my undergraduates. The seventeenth-
century naturalist John Ray, who wrote one of
the most famous books about God as Designer,
lost his daughter Mary when she was twelve. The
Enlightenment’s Erasmus Darwin, who developed
one of the first theories of evolution, buried three
of his twelve (legitimate) children when they were
infants. The codiscoverer (with Charles Darwin)
of natural selection, Alfred Russel Wallace, lost
a boy at six, and “Darwin’s bulldog,” Thomas
Henry Huxley, buried his firstborn son at four.
Botanist Joseph Dalton Hooker lost his little girl
Maria when she was six. (Within an hour of her
death he wrote to Charles Darwin, who lost a
three-week-old infant, Mary Eleanor, in 1842;
a ten-year-old daughter, Annie, in 1851; and an
eighteen-month-old son, Charles, in 1858. “I
think of you more in my grief,” Hooker confided,
“than any other friend. Some obstruction of the
bowels carried her off after a few hours alarming
illness—with all the symptoms of strangulated
Hernia.”) Mary Harriman, a philanthropist who
bankrolled American eugenics work, lost a five-
year-old boy to diphtheria. Annie Besant, who
tried to convince Darwin to support her campaign
for contraception, became an atheist after watch-
ing her seven-month-old daughter struggle with
a terrible bout of whooping cough. One could go
on and on.
None of this, of course, is surprising to anyone
familiar with both the state of medicine and the
prevalence of childhood infectious diseases prior
to the twentieth century. And children’s deaths
are acknowledged, at times, as important within
the biographies of these influential men and
women and their friends. Indeed, the influence of
the loss of Darwin’s daughter Annie on his beliefs,
including his theory of evolution, has been the
subject of an entire book and a major motion
picture. But—perhaps because the loss of a child
is not something many of us, at least in certain
parts of the world, have to experience thanks to
modern medicine and public health—I had never
really thought through the commonality of my
subjects’ experience with childhood death and suf-
fering until I witnessed Claire’s parents struggling
to reconcile the efforts and failures of science
with God’s providence. This heightened attention