Robert wanted his son to be a doctor, a physician, like he was. In fact, he wanted both of his sons, Ras (short for Erasmus) and Charlie to study medicine. So, in the autumn of 1825, Robert sent the pair of young men to the most prestigious medical school in the United Kingdom and, in fact, also Robert’s own alma mater: The University of Edinburgh. The reputation of the school was beyond dispute. Almost all of the modern medical world passed through the medical school in the Scottish capital city. And Robert wished that his sons would have the best education possible–as he himself had.

So, the brothers (Ras was a few years older than Charlie) took some rooms only a few steps away from the medical college on what was then Lothian Street, south of the Royal Mile and near what is today the Scottish National Museum. The rooms, the boys found were bright and airy and not at all stuffy as much of the student rooms in Edinburgh tended to be. At first, all seemed well; the boys loved Edinburgh, and they attended their lectures and classes and conducted themselves like the young, gentlemanly students they were.

However, as I mentioned, Ras was older than Charlie, and he had already been studying medicine at Cambridge in England for some time. By the time the spring of 1826 rolled around, Ras was pretty much finished with the Edinburgh part of his training. It was time for him to go to London to complete his medical education at the anatomy school there. That left Charlie alone in the Scottish city. And it was that spring that Charlie decided he didn’t like the study of medicine. Writing to one of his sisters, he complained that the lectures were boring him to the point of madness. He stopped attending his required beginning anatomy labs. He began hanging out in the natural sciences departments of the university, and he started to learn about botany and what today we would call earth science.

All of this disappointed Charlie’s father. The hopes he had for his son to follow in his footsteps as a physician were fading, fast. Now, it didn’t help that Robert’s youngest son was only 16 when he left home to go to university and then was a still-young 17 when Ras left him alone in Edinburgh. So, it quite possible that homesickness played a part in Charlie’s decision to quit the medical school at Edinburgh after less than two years there. He talked often of going into the clergy as his family had a long history of ministers as well as physicians. Ras, for his part, was a sickly young man most of the time; his delicate constitution proved too fragile for medicine. Thus, it was with great sadness on his father’s part that Ras also quit his medical studies at the precise moment that he was about to finish them. Neither son, then, followed in Robert’s footsteps.

Of course, Charlie wouldn’t become a minister, either. No, the interest he found in the natural sciences at university soon put Charles Darwin aboard the ship The Beagle and on the way to changing how we view our natural world.