by Susan Griffith

A typical day in Patricia Princehouse's seminar on "Darwin's View of Life" finds students engaged in animated discussions on a range of subjects—from what is the nature of science to what it means to be married to questions of whether humans are born with an innate sense of morals to do what is right.

photo by Susan Griffith Patricia Princehouse and Danielle Gartner decipher the Victorian script handwriting of Charles Darwin.

The students meet in the Dittrick Medical History Center in the Allen Memorial Library just a few feet away from a valuable and important legacy of 179 letters written by naturalist Charles Darwin to his contemporaries.

Information from the letters provides a first-hand account of what Darwin was thinking and doing at the time he penned his famous theories on evolution and wrote On the Origin of Species (1859) and The Descent of Man (1871). As part of the experiential learning situation, Princehouse assigned each student a Darwin letter from the Dittrick's collection to study for a class presentation. Students transcribe and decipher the letters and post their findings to an electronic Blackboard site.

James Edmonson, curator of the Dittrick Center, assists students in navigating through the extensive collection of 60,000 volumes of medical history-and especially ones, such as first editions of all of Darwin's works, that were particularly important during Darwin's life or upon his field of study.

Edmonson also gave students the opportunity to touch and view a part of history as he shared such items from the Dittrick collection ranging from leech jars and cupping sets used when Darwin was in medical school to surgical tools to amputate arms and legs during the Civil War.

The Darwin letters are the foundations of two class projects.

Princehouse said each student will write a research paper tracking the evolution of Darwin's ideas as they travel from mere musings in letters to articulated hypotheses in Darwin's own publications, to major fields of study in 20th century biology and related fields.

The second project is a collaborative class effort. By semester's end, the class will have found and organized artifacts from the Dittrick—such as rare books, engravings of Darwin's study and home, letters and legends that they researched and wrote-for an exhibit that will go on display at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History in August. The exhibit will include specimens from the Cleveland Museum of Natural History collections to compliment the letters and books from the Dittrick.

The class is part of the new Seminar Approach to General Education and Scholarship (SAGES) program. CWRU selected 150 students from a pool of volunteers to be part of the program's inception.

The program began in the fall with classes that focused on the "Life of the Mind," in which President Edward M. Hundert and faculty from the College of Arts and Sciences, Case School of Engineering and the Weatherhead School of Management taught small classes of 15 students. The seminars explored how the transformative nature of a research university contributes to the intellectual lives of its members, to the community and to the greater unity of knowledge, according to Princehouse.

During the second semester, SAGES' university seminars-such as Princehouse's class-allowed students to explore thematic topics of how they think about their natural, social or symbolic world. The Darwin class focuses on the natural world.

Many of the classes draw upon the resources of University Circle's institutions.

SAGES also pilots a bold, innovative curriculum and direction for education at CWRU that strengthens and enhances the culture of inquiry, exposes students to a breadth of learning experiences and sets the students on path of what the University hopes is a life-long zest for learning.

Danielle Gartner, a first-year student from Mt. Pleasant, Mich., gives Darwin's letters the white-glove treatment. As she struggles to decipher Darwin's personal writing style with his obscure abbreviations for words, Gartner realizes she is holding history in her hands and the actual words penned by the man they are reading about in the classroom text, Darwin: The Life of a Tormented Evolutionist.

"You suddenly realize he is more than just a celebrity," Gartner said.

The Darwin letters came to the Dittrick Museum in 1972 through a donation by Florence Stecher, the wife of Robert M. Stecher. Stecher was an avid collector of Darwin writings.

The bulk of the letters are from Darwin's correspondence over 35 years with the Rev. J. Brodie Innes about his personal and family life.

Another part of the Darwin letter collection was written between 1860 (a year after the publication of the Origin of Species) and until Darwin's death in 1882 to entomologist Henry Walter Bates, who had spent 11 years in the Amazon River region in South America. The Bates letter provided Darwin with information about the flora and fauna of the area.

Princehouse said the letters allow students to experience Darwin's brilliant scientific mind nearly first-hand.

"It's the next best thing to sitting the students down to a time machine dinner with Charles Darwin," she said.

 

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