In Our Time - Vitalism

Episode Date: October 16, 2008

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Vitalism, an 18th and 19th century quest for the spark of life. On a dreary night in November 1818, a young doctor called Frankenstein completed an experiment and described it in his diary: “I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet…By the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open…”Frankenstein may seem an outlandish tale, but Mary Shelley wrote it when science was alive with ideas about what differentiated the living from the dead. This was Vitalism, a belief that living things possessed some spark of life, some vital principle, perhaps even a soul, that distinguished the quick from the dead and lifted them above dull matter. Electricity was a very real candidate; when an Italian scientist called Luigi Galvani made dead frogs twitch by applying electricity he thought he had found it. Vitalists aimed at unlocking the secret of life itself and they raised questions about what life is that are unresolved to this day. With Patricia Fara, Fellow of Clare College and Affiliated Lecturer in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at Cambridge University; Andrew Mendelsohn, Senior Lecturer in the History of Science and Medicine at Imperial College, University of London and Pietro Corsi, Professor of the History of Science at the University of Oxford.

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For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, on a dreary night in November 1818, a young doctor called Frankenstein completed an experiment and described it in his diary. I collected the instruments of life around me that I might infuse a spark of being

into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet. By the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open. Frankenstein may seem an Atlantish tale, but Mary Shelley wrote it when science was alive with ideas about what differentiated the living from the dead. This was vitalism, a belief that living creatures possess some spark of life,

some vital principle, which is not to be explained mechanistically, not a product solely of chemistry or physics. Descartes had proposed its opposite, materialism in the 17th century and set of a great debate in which electricity played an important part. With me to discuss vitalism are Andrew Mendelsohn, Senior Lecture in the History of Science and Medicine at Imperial College London, Pietro Corsey, Professor of the History of Science at the University of Oxford, and Pritia Fara, senior tutor at Clare College, Cambridge University.

Prisha Fara, it's a huge subject, but let's start with the discovery of a fish in South America called a torpedo fish, Can you explain why that amazed the people at the time and what significance it had? Well, the torpedo fish is called that because it induces a sort of torpor in your body. And there'd been rumours ever since the times of the Greeks that there were some giant creatures that lived in the oceans that could give you a colossal shot rather like the remora that was meant to hang on to the side of ships

and drag them down into the bottom of the ocean. And during the 18th century, because there were more international voyages, of finding more of these fish around the globe. And there are some of these, what we now think of as electric fish, which live near Britain. And an MP, who used to be the Secretary to Clive of India, decided he was going to investigate these fish and find out if the sort of feeling that you get, when you put your hand in the water near one of these fish, whether that feeling is the same as the electricity that comes,

or the feeling that comes from lightning in the sky, or that comes from an electrical machine. So the basic debate at the time was to find what it is in all these fish that gives you a colossal shock that feels as though you've been struck by the same sort of shock that comes out of an electrical machine. So is the living electricity of the fish the same as the artificial electricity that's produced by an artificial means? And how did that feed into the argument about vitalism,

the debate about vitalism? Can you relate it to the idea of the importance of the ether, something that Newton discussed? A man called, just keeping to the torpedo for the moment, a man called Henry Cavendish, who was a very eccentric but very gifted researcher, devised a sort of artificial electric fish, which he made with a sort of wooden frame and covered it with sheepskin, and he attached a huge electric. generated to it so that it would give a huge shock.

And he invited various people to stick their arms into the water and see what happened to them. And surprise, surprise, they got a colossal shock. So, again, the debate was to work out whether that feeling that had been produced in human beings from this artificial fish, whether that was the same feeling as you got when you put your hand in the water with a real living torpedo. It was only towards the end of the century in about the same. the 1770s, 1780s, that people got really interested in this vitalist question of what is it that distinguishes something that's alive from something that's dead? And it relates to an older

question, how is it that if you've got a mind or a soul and you've got a body, how is it that those two can relate to each other? How is it that your brain can tell your body what to do? And one solution to that problem had indeed been suggested by Newton's ether. The idea that, the idea that that somehow inside your nerves, there's some sort of fluid with little particles in it that vibrate so that if I have an idea in my head, it sort of sends vibrations down my nerves to my hand so that I can pick up a glass of water,

and vice versa, vibrations go back up to my head along the nerves through this rather strange, slippery ether made of mysterious particles, sending the feeling from my hand back up to my brain. And so electricity isn't, It has a central part to play in this argument that we're going to examine in this programme. Yes, because earlier in the century, people like Benjamin Franklin, for example, who was very famous for his researchers into electricity,

has suggested that electricity might provide the means by which God could control the universe, God as pure spirit could interact with the material universe, and how human beings or animals as well could use their might, could enable their minds to control their body. Because the traditional Christian view and a view of a lot of people is that there's a very, very sharp distinction between matter, the atoms that your body is made of, and mind or spirit. And the problem is if you hold that dualist point of view,

how do you get those two things to interact? And that relates very closely to the vitalist debate about what is it that distinguishes a dead body from a living body when the chemicals comprising them seem very, very similar, but yet there is a very obvious difference between me now when I'm alive and me when I'm dead. Andrew Mendelsohn, as I understand it, this question of what differentiates a living thing

from non-living things goes back to Aristotle, and then it came into focus for the purposes of our debate, but it did, indeed come into focus on the 17th and 18th century. First of all, briefly, what did Aristotle, what was Aristotle's point? Well, let me put the two questions together, actually. because these things do go all the way back to the ancient Greeks and to Aristotle, but most people were, most of the learned world were Aristotelians until 16th and 17th centuries. And this meant that you don't have a problem of vitalism or a question of vitalism

or a vitalistic position until that period of the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries, because everyone was a vitalist, in a sense. That's oversimplifying. But why? Because nature wasn't yet like a machine. That's the key point. So back to Aristotle, in this Aristotelian worldview, nature is not a sort of collection of matter in motion, obeying blind laws. In order to explain something as an Aristotelian, you need to think about four causes, not just if we take a table, a carpenter, the moving cause, who actually made it. but also the matter it's made of the form of the table and above all, the highest form of explanation, the final cause, the purpose for which that table was made.

The telos, as the Greeks would say, hence the word teleology, which is very important in all of this. And the purpose, of course, would be to sit here and have our microphones on the table or to eat dinner or whatever it is. So it's something separate from the carpenter who made it. So that's just a table example. But that's the way the Aristotelians understood the whole universe, that it was full of purpose. And to understand things, you had to look for their so-called final causes or purposes. And what's interesting there is that that means that when they tell you about nature,

they always end up giving you biological examples. So Aristotelian physics is a lot, is very biological, yes? So there isn't a mechanistic position because the inanimate world doesn't yet seem like a machine. And he's saying, as I understand it, there's an organizing principle of life, which has been translated sometimes as the soul, and this is a part. So that idea then through Aquinas and melds into Christianity and is racing up towards the 17th. For the purposes of this discussion, that will do, I think.

Descartes, he had the man as a machine, the mechanistic view. Yes, so the big change then that happens and that Descartes is a key article. in the 17th century. In the 17th century. In the 17th century, the big change is that nature does become plausibly like a machine, which it had not been like before. And we can talk about that on and on, about how technologies, instead of being distortions of nature, art, came to seem as perhaps good models for the natural world.

And Descartes took this a step further and said that actually the animal is a machine. And what he meant there is he said that when this is the non-living living issue, what's the difference? He said that when something dies, it is not because the soul leaves it, yeah, which is what the Aristotelians would have said. It's because the watch breaks, the mechanism breaks down. That's what he said. Now, that's, why is, why, why was he so keen on that position? It wasn't just because he was some kind of techno freak of the 17th century who thought that everything was a machine. It was because he was actually.

a religious man, he was a monk, and his chief worry in life was that he couldn't trust his senses, and that the whole material world and himself might not actually exist. It might all be an illusion, a dream. And his solution to this was, as we all know, I think, therefore I am. That sounds very far away from vitalism, doesn't it? But if you say, if you're a rescue from being worried that the material world might be an illusion is, I think, therefore I am, then you matter make darn well sure that thought and matter are totally separate. So we have a dualism there? A dualism.

The material and the immaterial world, the soul and the body have got to be separate. But we see these at the opposite end of things, but then someone comes like Harvey, a circulation of blood, comes along, and I hesitate to use the word compromise. Well, I'm not going to hesitate. And he does bring, as it were, brings those two together, doesn't they? Yes. Well, that's the interesting thing, is that it's not all black and white. And Descartes lays out this position for,

for the reasons that I've just described, which show us that vitalism is a much bigger issue than a sort of history of ideas about life. It involves huge questions of religion and philosophy. And so now Harvey, the interesting thing about Harvey is that he gives us, to put it in a nutshell, really quickly, he gives us what might be seen as a kind of founding moment of understanding life

in terms of being a mechanism. The heart is a pump. Yeah. So the heart is a pomp. But actually, if you look at what he did, he was a staunch Aristotelian, which means that he was interested in the heart for its purpose, its final cause, which he saw, he called it a treasury of life. So the blood comes back into the heart for a purpose,

and that purpose is that it becomes, as he called it, impregnated with spirits and subtlety, and it gives life. So we have both there. Can I turn to you, Pietro Cossey? There's a story about this French philosopher, who was out walking with a dog in this path. he kicked the dog, the dog ran away, the lady was with complain and said, poor old dog,

you've hurt it, and he said, no, they don't feel a thing, they're just machines. Now, it was getting into the culture, wasn't it at that time? Absolutely. That was, of course, Fontenelle, who was a great philosopher and was secretary to the Academy of Sciences. You better get good here. We'd be shot, and in fact the lady was shot, and in fact, we

think that Fontaineel answer was rather weak, especially in front of a lady. But nevertheless, let me draw attention to two things, since you invited us in the in the agreement we took before the emission to intervene on something. Patricia said something very interesting when she was talking about Franklin, that is for Franklin electricity,

maybe the way in which God operates to nature. Now, that idea has a long story. It takes one second to remind people that the inventor of the electroencephalogram. So that machine that you go through, hopefully none of you will go to it, but, you know, that monitors the electrical activity of your brain, Berger, a German, believed that his machine was going to spot the energy P, which was the way in which the soul was operating on the body. And we are at the beginning of the 20th century. So there is a long story of the idea that electricity may be a way of putting together what Descartes was not able to put together.

Descartes was the point of conjunction between mind and body and matter. There couldn't be any, isn't it, because they are two completely different entities. However, he believed that it was a little piece in the brain, the pineal gland, that may be there there was a way in which the thought, the spirit, may interfere with matter. But I would also draw attention to two things. The Christian attitude towards, or even the Aristotelian attitude towards life, is quite ambiguous because if you take St. Thomas, the great 13th century, century, father of the church, St. Thomas believed that up to frogs and snakes, they are produced

by matter. They are spontaneously generated in mud. So, you know, there too tells you how difficult it is to, as Patricia said in the beginning, how difficult is to cut the word into two. The second worry that people had in the 17, and especially in the 18th century, is the powerful resurgence of epicureanism. through a Latin poet, whom I like very much, Lucretius, who wrote a poem called Dererum Natura about things in nature. And the idea that those Epicureans put forward was already shocking to Aristotle, who fought against it,

was shocking to Dante in the Divine Comedy, the great Italian poet, put Epicureans in hell as being really dangerous people. What were these dangerous people saying? Well, they were saying that atoms can combine without any teleology, without any finality, that life is just the combination of atoms coming together. There is no beginning, no end, no purpose, no meaning. And that was extremely popular throughout Europe.

Beginning in the 15th century, Lucretius started being read by the 18th century. It was a bestseller. So people who had to define even Harvey himself, who famously said, everything comes from eggs. So Harvey, to some extent, accepted the idea that there is a machine inside the body, a pump, the heart, but also believed that there is no possibility

of making mistakes about machines and bodies, because bodies are born always out of eggs. That is, Harvey took a distance with that Christian tradition that admitted spontaneous generation, that agreed that in fact some animals could be produced

through a combination of matters. The idea that electricity and life can join in through spontaneous generation was extremely popular again. And you want me to stop here? Just in 1837 at the British Association for the Advancement of Science, a man called Cross announced that he had produced an insect through voltaic electricity. A few weeks later, everyone said he was a fool, but in fact, at the moment, people were extremely excited.

So even in 1837, people could be excited by someone announcing that if you put electricity into a kind of soup, you can get insects around. Let's come to electricity. We have what seems to have happened. Andrew pointed out that people were all vitalists until the 17th century, and that our city, and that had flowed through and followed through and been mediated by the church but not altered by the church. And religion was in a very powerful position as regards to the ownership of knowledge. at the time, but the vitalism idea did bring on a debate and a battle. And electricity was a very important part of that.

So can we turn to that, Patricia Farrow, in the end of the 18th century, Luigi Galvani, Italian scientists, claimed that he had found the vital force that science had been looking for. And he was very exultant about this, and if he had found it, right to be. Can you exactly tell us what he did and why he thought it was such, an important discovery. It was a hugely important discovery and it was very closely linked with another Italian discovery,

Alessandro Volta. And Galvani and Volta had in some ways quite similar results. They interpreted them very differently. Galvani is quite well known. Did lots of experiments with frog's legs and I won't go into all the details

because they're a bit gory at this time of morning. But the basic idea was that he, by having two different kinds of metal, he could make a frog's leg twitch because what in our terms, an electric current was going through the frog from the two different kinds of metal. What he believed was that he had detected some innate animal electricity and he refused to believe that this animal electricity that lived inside the frogs and, I'm afraid to say he experimented with other animals as well, that lived inside those animals was absolutely not the same as anything that could be

produced by human beings. He was at this stage quite an elderly retiring sort of person. Napoleon Bonaparte was in power. Alessandro Volta was much younger. He was much more pushy. He allied himself with Bonaparte and got a very powerful patron. And he decided he was going to prove that he could build a machine that would make this animal electricity. So he built what he called a pile, is the precursor of the electric battery. And as it's a little, as it's name, he's a little, suggests it's a little pile of discs. He alternated two different kinds of metal, such as zinc and brass, and in between he had cardboard, and it was all soaked in brine, and he sort of linked it up, and he did experiments on himself, like putting leads on either side of his tongue and feeling what

happened, and he proved that his pile could generate electricity, which had very, very similar effects to the annual electricity that Galvani was detecting. And Volta wrote, sent off a paper to Joseph Banks, his ally in London, and the paper was published, and Volta said, my instrument proves that the electricity produced inside Cavendish's artificial torpedo is exactly the same as the electricity inside Galvani's frogs and inside a real living torpedo. Pietro Gosser, what significance did these two men have

on the discussion, the debate about the spark of life? Enormous, because again, I refer to what Patricia said in the beginning, it's very difficult to define vitalism. And in fact, the difficulty is evident when you answer your question, when I will answer your question. That is, what different did this make? Well, people interpret it in different ways. Some people said, well, it is just another physical principle that was Volta's position.

It's just one physical principle that operates in nature. So it doesn't really impinge upon the question of vitality. Other people believed, on the contrary, that we are really need. near discover, like Franklin was convinced about. We are near discovering some active principle in nature. Now, some people said that in the name of Newton. There are probably active

principles in nature. It is not just matter and movement, but there is something else. Perhaps vegetation, how plants grow may be due to an active principle. The behaviour of ether itself may be something to do with the active principle, so people felt that

electricity was constituting the link between matter and spirit. It was a kind of matter getting into a spiritual state. Galvani and Bolt had an almost influence in a philosopher, German philosopher like Schopenhauer, for instance, who really believed that electricity represents a form of will at the level of matter. I just wanted to jump in there to say that it really depends on who picks up electricity and what they want to do with it really. So by the 1840s, you have, a group in Germany who you have someone like Dubois-Ré-Mont, who's one of the founders of modern

physiology, we say. And in 1848, he publishes huge treaties on animal electricity. Yeah, so it sounds like, well, it sounds like a contribution to vitalism if electricity is the spark of life. But he was the most, he was the father of mechanism in a sense. I mean, he were in the 19th century. So he and some of his colleagues in 1840s had set out to create what they called an organic physics and to explain all of life just by physics. But it is going to, Andrew, for this question, it is going ding-dong this debate, and we must keep that in mind during this program for,

because that's what we said we were going to talk about. I mean, of course we are. When the vitalist ideas moved into the study of human embryology, that was an application, which, as it were, was it seemed to be a plus for vitalism, didn't it, the work of Frederick Bob, for instance? Can you talk about that? Yes.

And its significance in the debate. Yeah. I mean, I suppose the simple way of putting it is that in the question of development of the embryo, the old Aristotelian position won. So if we just said before that there was something vitalistic about Aristotelianism, and we now say that that's the position that sort of won out, then what we're saying is that that's the relationship. So what was that position?

It was called there were two positions. One position was pre-formationism, and that was the notion it's like a homunculus, like the miniature man is actually inside the egg and it just gets bigger. And the other position was called... And is that link to the idea that the sperm is electrical? That might be a variation on the theme.

It's in your own. Well, the main point is that with the preformationist view, you basically just get an enlargement of this tiny, preformed being. And in the view that Aristotle championed, Harvey picked up, not surprisingly, from what we've just said, and then Wolf in the 18th century and others

really pushed through was the notion that actually there isn't any preformed structure. So it's as if you do get something from nothing. And what that means is there must be some kind of organizing properties. There must be that kind of T-Loss, that end, that purpose. So in the egg, there must be a principle.

Sorry, excuse me, sorry. Yeah. Inside the egg, there must be some principle of life to use Aristotle, which turns that egg into what becomes a human being, rather than there being a human being. Already there. Minutely in the egg in the first place. So that epigenesis is a proof to some people of vitalism at the beginning of life.

Petra Corser, you wanted to come in. Oh, no, simply to go a bit further than what you suggest. Yes, indeed, there were people who be. believe that the male sperm contains what was called aura that is a kind of vital aura, a vital fluid ether, that organizes the nutritional material of the egg. So in fact, people who believe that the sperm of males, in animals who, of course, have sexually reproduction, obviously,

is important in the shaping of the organisms, insisted that that kind of ether, that kind of subtle fluid, may be akin to electricity. One of the founders of evolution, Lamarck, who is not celebrated this year because we all celebrate Darwin, believed that in fact every single species has a different kind of electricity present in the sperm and therefore every single sexual action forms the egg according to that power of electricity

that shapes and organizes the matter. What was the status then, Patricia Farah, of electricity as a vitalist idea? Was it just one of many ideas? Was it the leading idea? Did it seem to some people to be the fundamental idea? I think during the 18th century, electricity became, in a sense, the explanation for everything

because it was so new and so exciting. I think it really reached its peak, as far as my work is concerned, in the vitalist debate, in the early 19th century when a surgeon called John Abernithy was trying again to explain what it meant for a body to be alive and he wanted to contradict

that there's the extreme materialist position which says that life is just the chemicals that you're made out of there's the traditional religious position which says that life is only given to you by God Abernethy in a sense tried to establish a compromise his position, in which he said, perhaps life is some

super-added substance such as electricity. And that statement by Abanithi, which led to a huge debate with one of his own students called William Lawrence, was the really sort of the most controversial, the most famous

aspect of the relationship between electricity and vitalism. We'll develop that in a moment when we come to Frankenstein, because Lawrence was connected with Percy Shelley, and so on. But Andrew Mendelsoson, we have a battle in France between Paris, the centre of mechanism, and Montpellier, the centre of vitalism. Is it, yeah, by being too crude there, will you please make it more subtle and completely understandable? Yes. Well, I think what you're referring to is medicine, which has been slightly missing from the discussion.

So Montpellier was an important centre of medicine and medical learning in France, and it was a centre of, of what we call neo-hypocratism. So the revival of Hippocratic Medicine. And Hippocratic medicine was, I suppose, the important idea here is really that there are two, to put it simply, very different approaches to the medical art. One is to put your faith in what we do today,

which is our own powers to heal. So technological intervention, powerful drugs and so on. The other view is to put your faith in nature. So if you go back to Hippocrates, you find this powerful notion of the healing power of nature. And this was part of medical experience because a lot of diseases did seem to get better. So the role of the physician was to do things

that would help nature naturally heal. the body naturally heal itself. So if your primary medical role is that role, and if you see the body as possessing this healing power of nature, then you are likely to take a vitalistic position, yes? So because you see that things get better, that bodies seem to have this purpose, they seem to be able to pull themselves together and heal themselves.

Whereas if your faith is in human capacities, and you give patients these heavy drugs to try to make them better and you feel that that's actually doing something, then you're likely to be a mechanist in a sense. So the wider point there is not just that, yes, medics had their own issues, their own vitalist-mechanist debates, but that something about vitalism to understand the history of ideas about life, we need to understand not just one idea after another, but what was people relationship, what was their stance toward technology, toward human capacities

and how did they see that in relationship to nature? Were they optimists about what human beings could do or were they optimists about what nature could do? At the beginning of the 19th century though, we seem to have three, broadly speaking, three themes in ideas working to the religious which is still, we must emphasize, because we tend, in this country anywhere, we'd be

far less religious, to forget how powerful it was, how established it was, it was, the center of knowledge, it was the holder of knowledge. Religious, we have the ideas of vitalism, which have come to the fore because of the debate. Then we have the mechanical ideas. So is this thought of at the time in the early 19th century

as are these the three points of different people following? Is this dividing the community of then still called natural philosophers? We don't get the word science until the 1830s. Is this what's dividing them? Well, you can certainly sum up and as you have done until now, you

can certainly say, okay, there are main trends and main ways of looking at things. However, what becomes more and more clear? Let me be very concrete. If you read medical dictionaries of the period, that is end of the 18th century, beginning of the 19th century

and at the beginning of the 19th century, a good number of medical dictionaries are done in France and translated throughout Europe, what you find is, let me use another technical word, it's syncretism. That is, people try to put a lot of things together. They even

theorize. In philosophy, there is, a school called eclecticism. That means in every system there is a part of truth. Let's pull this together. So in actual terms, if you read, for instance, a very popular dictionary, the dictionaire de science medical, which was published in 60 volumes between 1811 to 1821, an enormous editorial enterprise, on which a lot of medical students from England trained. About 250 medical students were going to learn. medicine in Paris after the fall of Napoleon in 1815. What you find there is the attempt to put together these things.

For instance, the dictionary I'm mentioning it has a very long entry called V-Life. It's about 80 pages long. It details everything. It takes up Descartes, take up Stahl, Van Helmand, all the tradition. But also said that probably the way in which God works is through those mechanical, electrical, vital principles. But what they propose is a kind of of syncretic view which says, well, if you want to pursue a mechanistic or a rigidly electrical

deterministic point of view, you can. But in the end, you have to be a remind that life has to be explaining in provincial terms. Andrew, do you want to come in briefly because I want to go to cross the path? Yes, just if I can, to say that the other side of the story is that different positions here, of syncretism is that different positions in this period are becoming increasingly polarized and dangerous. So in the 18th century, you get not just vitalists versus mechanisms, but you get a new position, which is materialist, which basically says that not only are animals machines, but man is a machine,

and thought itself is the soul is just an enlightened machine. That was what one radical Frenchman said. and that thought is the secretion of the brain, as another radical fragment said. And that was obviously very worrying for anybody who was trying to maintain that separation between matter and soul that we referred to as being important to Descartes, but also these 19th century debates that Patricia referred to. And the novel Frankenstein, Mary Shelley, 1818, is Frankenstein, the monster was called the creature.

She called him the creature, the monster is of Boris Karloff edition, I think. I corrected myself as soon as I could. Creature is one of those sympathetic beings in that book. Fine. The creature was born through electricity. Well, she doesn't actually specify that. She never actually makes it very, very clear. But everybody assumes it's by electricity.

She does not actually say that Frankenstein gets an electrical machine. So we've established that. The inference is that it's electricity. We're just about that. So what, Shelley took that, her husband, Shelley wrote an introduction about the possibility of this occurring. You've already mentioned Lawrence in the debate. Yes. So how did that play into the debate?

The introduction that Percy Shelley wrote, a paid great tribute to Erasmus Darwin, who was Charles Darwin's grandfather, who himself formulated a theory of evolution, and in some ways can also be seen to have had a voice. vitalist theory of life. By the time you get to the early 19th century, and I'm sorry to complicate this further, but it's very clouded by the politics of the situation. So to call someone a materialist is a term of abuse because you're linking them with France. So this debate between Abernithy and Lawrence about whether life comes through electricity

or not is not just a debate about the science, is about religious beliefs, and it's also about political beliefs. It is also about the confrontation between chemistry and a new science of biology. William Lawrence, who was also Percy Shelley's doctor, coined the word biology in English around about this time. And his position was that it's not a pure materialist position. Life doesn't come just from matter.

It was absolutely who wasn't having anything to do with Abernethy's electricity. He thought that was complete rubbish. In his view, and it's rather a difficult one to explain, is that life comes from organisation. So it's a more biological view than a chemical view. Everybody was very quick to slate him as an out-and-out materialist, even though he wasn't, because they wanted to denounce him and because of all the political associations

of being linked with materialism, France, and overturning the British Constitution. Peter Cosley, what effect did the discovery of, or did Lawrence's views have on the debate? Well, Lawrence's was a co-celebrity. It was a famous case because he was dismissed practically from his teaching. And even in a very famous work at the time, in 1830 still Sir Hamphry Davy in a book called Consolations in Travels, blasted against medical people who want you to believe that life developed by itself from the most. honor to man and Sir Amphrey Davies says, I took a walk in the green to contemplate

nature and God's actions. So that was really very heavy. I think my colleague very rightly pointed out to the extreme importance of politics and of course of religion as well as part of politics. However, I don't think we have time to embark into that because if you then take

politics in, you have to remember that politics changes over time and people change. So indeed, materialists, was considered to be extremely dangerous and it was proven to be. However, by the beginning of the 19th century, some people tried to put things together

and saying, well, you can't consider that living beings work like that, but that is a simple way in which there is a simple explanation. God operates this way. So a lot of people try to save the science, so to speak, by taking away the radical

the radical elements in it. And there was a constant, If you look, for instance, I work on France a lot, and sometimes you have to work month after once. I give you a very clear instance. Someone who says in January 1800, sorry, in January 1802, someone says, I'm going to establish a new science. I will call it biology. The same person, six months later, say, oh, by the way, as far as biology is concerned, I'm getting old, I'm tired, I don't have time. In six months, French politics has changed. In six months, this man has realized that, biology as a material science was not acceptable anymore. In six months, this man gives back the project and says,

sorry, I'm not going to do that. So it's really very tense and intense. Can I come to Andrew Mendelsohn? We've got into words, and I must put you in a couple of points. There was increasing expertise in physiology in the 19th century, the work of the French physician Claude Bernard. That increase in the understanding of the function of the body, did that seem to give sound a death knell for vitalism?

This is a really important question, and the answer is no. And what it will teach us is what we might call for giving the pun the vitality of vitalism. So vitalism is not like geocentrism. It's not something that the Earth is the center of the universe. It's not like something that people just decide is wrong and give up on. Those who, what Claude Bernard did was show, for example, that animals can, people thought that animals could only break down things. They couldn't actually create things like complex molecules inside themselves. And he showed that they could, in fact, do that.

And in order to understand his position, we need to contrast it with the one that I mentioned before when I mentioned the German physiologist Dubois-Rémond, who wrote this treatise on animal electricity. Now, that position was that we are now going to explain life by physics and chemistry, right? So that's totally against the notion that there's any kind of separation between, vital and unanimated things. And this proved in many ways to fail. So you could say that the mechanistic position failed, in the sense that what they did is they did a lot of measurements of electricity.

They sort of devitalized electricity, and they were very important in that way, so they could quantify electricity in muscular action and so on. But what Claude Bernard said is that actually there is something different about life, but it is deterministic. That was his key word. So he was saying that it's not unpredictable living things. So if I, he was very surgically able to do experiments.

So if I go into the organism, and he did awful experiments, very bloody ones as well, and if I tie off this artery and that vein and that one, and then I can show that sugar is being made in the liver, great discovery. But what this shows is that, living things are on the one hand machine-like in the sense that they're deterministic

that they're not unpredictable. On the other hand, they follow their own laws. So they are not understandable by physics and chemistry and that proves to be biology. Can I move forward as we're coming towards Ian Trisha Farah. Did DNA, discovery of DNA in the 1950s

an impact that follow through of that, did that completely kill off vitalism? I don't think vitalism as a debate can ever be killed off. It certainly hasn't been to date. it is constantly changing its nature. As far as I'm concerned, I don't think we are any nearer to understanding what it is that makes the difference between life and death. Yes, we've discovered DNA and gone further than that and map the human genome.

But it seems to me that fundamental question remains the same. And DNA emerged from a rather similar position to Lawrence's, this idea that, that life could be found in the organisation of a being. It was spurred after the Second World War. Scherninger wrote a very famous book in 1948 called What is Life? The same fundamental question that had been asked for centuries. And he's one of the many physicists

who is disillusioned with the atomic bomb. And he urged scientists to look at biology. He said, perhaps we'll be able to learn more about physics and chemistry by looking at the laws of living organisms. And the whole of modern molecular biology emerge from that post-war movement. Pietro Kossi finally,

do you think that the debate still continues? It could, for instance, take the religious implications of certain of these themes. Intelligent design draws upon a series of arguments that may be called vitalistic or in a certain sense. And there you are out of science. That is, if you want to believe that whatever is biological has some,

ulterior meaning you can but it is ulterior meaning. That is it is not what you are doing and people will continue to believe that. Thank you very much Patricia Farah, Andrew Mendelsohn and Pietro Kossi. Next week we'll be talking about Dante's Inferno a 14th century vision of hell

thank you very much for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programmes about history, science and philosophy at BBC.com.com.com.uk forward slash radio four