Background
He studied medicine at Edinburgh and started practice as a physician at Nottingham. In November 1756, Darwin settled down at Lichfield, where his reputation as a doctor was quickly established. As his methods were original and his cures unfashionably frequent, he was disliked by his fellow physicians; but as people preferred being cured in unorthodox ways to being killed in accordance with the recognized doctrines of medicine, his practice gradually became the largest in the English Midlands. He showed no interest in the proposal by George III that he should become the King's private physician. He married Mary Howard and took a pleasant house at Lichfield, where he sometimes met with Dr. Samuel Johnson, but they did not like one another because Darwin was of a highly skeptical nature while Johnson was superstitiously religious.
Soon Darwin was the center of an eminent circle of philosophers and inventors, such as Richard Lovell Edgeworth, the father of Maria; Thomas Day, author of Sandford and Merton; Josiah Wedgwood, the great potter; Samuel Galton, a notable Quaker; James Watt, the famous engineer; Matthew Boulton who manufactured Watt's first steam engine; and Joseph Priestley, the discoverer of oxygen. At the instigation of Darwin, these men formed an association called the Lunar Society, so named because they met in one another's houses at the full moon, by the light of which they were enabled to return home with greater safety. All their inventions and ideas were discussed at these meetings, and Priestley declared that his philosophical work was largely due to the encouragement he received at their sessions.
Among Darwin's many interests was botany. He converted a wild valley into a garden, which was visited by people from all over England, and eventually the subject inspired his best known poem "The Botanic Garden." Although it received the praises of William Cowper and Horace Walpole, and its two parts were extremely popular on their appearance in 1789 and 1791, the work must now be described as almost the last and far from the worst example of the school of verse initiated by Alexander Pope.
Darwin's first marriage lasted for thirteen years, and his eldest son eventually became the father of Charles Darwin, the naturalist. Ten years after the death of his first wife, he married the widow of Colonel Chandos Pole, and one of their daughters became the mother of Sir Francis Galton, the anthropologist. There is scarcely an idea or invention in the modern world that Erasmus Darwin did not originate or foresee, from evolution to eugenics, from airplanes to submarines, from antiseptics to psychoanalysis, from talking-machines to telephones. His great philosophical work Zoonomia (1794), first gave the world a well-rounded theory of evolution as well as the most plausible reasons for believing that origin of species by transmutation was possible. In Phytologia (1800), he wrote on agriculture and gardening; and in The Temple of Nature (1803), he again burst into verse, his subject being the origin of society.
On his second marriage in 1780, Darwin moved from Lichfield to Derby. He continued to travel about the countryside as a doctor, writing his books as his carriage bumped over the primitive roads, shocking his patients with his heterodox views on religion and politics, advising them to drink less, wash regularly and breathe fresh air, curing more people than he killed, and charging nothing for attending the poor. He died suddenly on Apr. 17, 1802.