RFK Jr. and the curious birth of ‘brainchild’

“No, RFK didn’t have a tapeworm eating his brain,” declared my husband in the rare tone he adopts when he knows what he is talking about.

I’d asked him, as a doctor, about something Robert F. Kennedy Jr. had said in 2012, according to a report published in the New York Times last year. A problem experienced in 2010 was, he had said, “caused by a worm that got into my brain and ate a portion of it and then died.”

“No, if it was cysticercosis,” my husband insisted, “it would have been a larval form of the tapeworm forming a cyst in the brain. They don’t eat the brain.”

We’d reached this conversational backwater via a recent article about the recording of Bach’s 371 chorale harmonizations on a Steinway piano – the brainchild of Nicolas Horvath.

What a strange term it is. How, I wondered, is a brainchild delivered when it comes to term? My own brain turned to Alien and the creature bursting from John Hurt’s chest.

The first known use of brainchild was in 1631. At the beginning of Ben Jonson’s play The New Inn, the landlord of the Light Heart boasts of the inn-sign of a feather outweighing a heart, as “A brayne-child o’mine owne!”

The original brainchild must be Athena. Zeus, after lying with the goddess Metis, feared the power of any child she bore, and so swallowed her down. He developed a terrible headache, only relieved with a blow from a double-headed axe. Out jumped Athena, fully armed. So much for delivery.

As for conception, Oliver Sacks, that imaginative neurologist, suggested that the musical earworm should really be a brainworm, after it bores its way, “like an earwig, into the ear.”

There he exploits the idea that earwigs are so-called because they burrow into the ear — which they don’t, as Robert F. Kennedy Jr. may be glad to hear.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s April 2025 World edition.