A healthy enthusiasm for danger

The picture on the dustwrapper of Suffer and Survive shows a genial-looking Victorian gent with a serious moustache — and it does not tell a lie. The physiologist J.S. Haldane was genial, serious, and extremely Victorian. He was an obstinate man of principle. He was a rigorous experimentalist with a philosophical bent. He was loyal but somewhat unfortunate in his marriage: Mrs Haldane spoke more of duty than of love, disagreed violently with his rather liberal politics (she was a fierce imperialist, and in favour of concentration camps in the Boer war), and denied him sex, transferring her attentions instead to a green macaw called Polly. He was a kind father (his children were the geneticist J.B.S. Haldane and the writer Naomi Mitchison), a generous colleague, a doting grandfather.

Haldane was prone, too, to bouts of the sort of mild eccentricity one likes to expect from Victorian gentleman scientists — he’d go upstairs to change for supper, for example, and have to be retrieved by his wife having lost the thread halfway through the process of undressing, donning his nightshirt and retiring to bed. But he was also — as Martin Goodman’s subtitle hints — a hard-charging inquirer into all corners of his chosen field; above all, the mechanisms of respiration.

Pretty much an invalid for most of his life (he was plagued by lumbago and rheumatic pain, and that’s before what he did to his own lungs), Haldane displayed astonishing stamina and personal sacrifice in his work. He experimented often, and punishingly, on himself. He put himself through exercises at immense heights and immense depths (he couldn’t swim, but went deep-sea diving in the interests of investigating the bends). He spent most of his working life up mountains, down mines, at the bottom of the sea, wading through sewers or gassing himself in the comfort of his own home.