Experimenting at the Boundaries of Life

Organic Vitality in Germany around 1800

Joan Steigerwald

• Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9780822986621
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: German History
• Index: History

Attempts to distinguish a science of life at the turn of the nineteenth century faced a number of challenges. A central difficulty was clearly demarcating the living from the nonliving experimentally and conceptually. The more closely the boundaries between organic and inorganic phenomena were examined, the more they expanded and thwarted any clear delineation. Experimenting at the Boundaries of Life traces the debates surrounding the first articulations of a science of life in a variety of texts and practices centered on German contexts. Joan Steigerwald examines the experiments on the processes of organic vitality, such as excitability and generation, undertaken across the fields of natural history, physiology, physics and chemistry. She highlights the sophisticated reflections on the problem of experimenting on living beings by investigators, and relates these epistemic concerns directly to the philosophies of nature of Kant and Schelling. Her book skillfully ties these epistemic reflections to arguments by the Romantic writers Novalis and Goethe for the aesthetic aspects of inquiries into the living world and the figurative languages in which understandings of nature were expressed.

Chapter 1

Organic Vitality in the Late Eighteenth Century

Lebenskräfte and Experimental Reasoning

HISTORIANS HAVE OFTEN REMARKED THE proliferation of vital forces at the end of the eighteenth century.¹ Authors in numerous German language publications insisted on a special principle to account for the distinct characteristics of organic life, and they debated whether irritability, sensibility, a reproductive force, or a general Lebenskraft best characterized that principle. Many of these authors situated their arguments within a longer history, citing earlier physicians, physiologists, and naturalists in support of their positions, enlisting the authority of Albrecht von Haller and Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, in particular. The intensity of these debates left a lasting legacy, and many subsequent figures felt the necessity of taking a stand on vital forces, especially in the context of their attempts to set out the conditions for a science of life. These debates are an important starting point, then, for the exploration of organic vitality in the years around 1800. In this chapter, however, I complicate received histories of Lebenskräfte by locating the widespread appeal to substantive vital forces within this polemic over vital principles in the early 1790s. Part of the reason for the intensity of the debate over principles of life was the explosive growth of German review journals and specialized periodicals. These periodicals not only provided a forum for discussion but also fueled the polemic and shaped its tone. The rapidly developing periodical culture in the late eighteenth century enabled formations of German language communities and facilitated exchange among individuals with similar interests spread across different states and municipalities. Many periodicals reviewed recent German publications, many also reviewed foreign language books and journals, and many published articles with original contributions. Besides the general review journals claiming to provide a common context for a German republic of letters, more specialized journals also appeared, especially in the 1790s, that were addressed to physicians, to professors of medicine, anatomy, and physiology, to naturalists, and to pharmacists, chemists, and physicists, although the boundaries between periodicals apparently dedicated to specific subjects were porous.² In the context of this rapidly developing periodical culture, with new review and specialized journals appearing every year, the rules of engagement for critique and anti-critique were in flux. The polemical tone and high rhetoric of some reviews drew attention to questions surrounding organic vitality but also narrowed discussion to the declaration of principles and reified positions rather than offering considered investigation of these questions.

Girtanner became the face of this debate. His 1790 “Abhandlungen über die Irritabilität als Lebensprincip in der organisierten Natur” (Treatise on the irritability as the principle of life in organized nature) contained several provocations. In this article he declared that life could be explained through a single principle and that irritability (the response of organic parts to stimuli) was this principle, and he further declared that irritability, and thus organic vitality, could be explained chemically. Girtanner made these pronouncements at a time when the boundaries between living and nonliving beings were becoming increasingly blurred. In the late eighteenth century, scientists making rapid developments in chemistry and physics offered new explanations of animal respiration and heat, and introduced new investigations of various organic processes. As a result, questions regarding organic vitality engaged professors of chemistry and physics as well as professors of medicine, anatomy, physiology, and zoology. Girtanner’s treatise was published in the Journal der Physik, but it was discussed in a variety of medical and chemical journals. The movement of the questions provoked by his work through these various journals itself contributed to the problem of delineating organic vitality. The lack of any disciplinary boundary around the study of living organisms left undecided who had authority to adjudicate the question of life or to pass judgment on life. As Girtanner lacked an academic position, his credibility was more readily called into question by established professors, physicians, and editors of journals; many of the critiques of Girtanner’s treatise were personal or ideological rather than addressed to the specificities of his scientific claims and experimental demonstrations. But the reaction sparked by Girtanner’s treatise is also indicative of the significance that organic vitality had acquired as an important matter of concern. At stake in these debates were questions regarding the nature of life, the proper concepts and principles for the explanation of vital phenomena, and the boundary between the organic and the inorganic.

The authors of the many reviews, articles, and books appearing in response to Girtanner’s treatise referenced earlier works, concepts, and experiments. Indeed, the newly invigorated debate over the question of organic vitality was littered with traces of the past. In the disputes of the early 1790s the works of two figures in particular were enlisted repeatedly as authoritative—Haller’s studies of irritability from the 1750s and Blumenbach’s studies of generative processes from the 1780s. The significance of Haller and Blumenbach to the contestation over organic vitality at the end of the eighteenth century confirms the important influence of the University of Göttingen, as signaled by Timothy Lenoir in his work on German vital materialism.³ Haller and Blumenbach, both professors in the prestigious medical school at Göttingen, had extended networks of students and correspondents who helped propagate their work. Both also edited and contributed to journals; Haller was extensively involved with the important Göttingische gelehrte Anzeigen (GGA) and Blumenbach edited the less influential Medicinische Bibliothek. Both also authored influential textbooks that were widely distributed in several editions in Latin and German as well as in other European languages well into and even beyond the 1790s.

After tracing the debate over vital powers in the early 1790s, the next two sections look critically at the contributions of Haller and Blumenbach to understandings of organic vitality and how they were taken up at the end of the eighteenth century. Haller’s name remains associated with irritability—despite his influential contributions to physiology and natural history more generally, and despite the broad associations of irritability with sensibility and excitability across medical and physiological theories in the latter eighteenth century. Although Haller argued for irritability as a mode of organic vitality distinct from sensibility and nerve action, in an attempt to distinguish the organic functions of animal life from the operations of the soul or mind, he never made irritability into a general principle of life. He characterized it as the capacity of muscle fibers to respond to stimulus; even in his general physiological works, irritability remained confined to discussions of the functions of muscles. Haller claimed to demonstrate irritability experimentally. But the artificial conditions under which he demonstrated the phenomena of irritability were cited to call into question his claims, and these questions produced widespread reflections on the appropriate methods and instruments for the study of the phenomena of organic life.

Blumenbach’s important investigations of generation were also experimental. Blumenbach came to the problem of generation in the context of growing evidence for degeneration or variations of organic kinds through the practices of natural history—through studies of cultivation and transplantation, and of hybrids and varied modes of reproduction. Taking his lead from Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon’s Histoire naturelle, générale et particulière (Natural History: General and Particular), Blumenbach regarded generative processes as the means through which the regular and yet variable reproduction of living beings could be understood. He presented his concept of the formative drive (or Bildungstrieb) as a mode of organic vitality characteristic of generative processes rather than as a general principle of life. The problem involved in any account of generation was to make the generative process manifest. Blumenbach employed experimental interventions into formative processes to make evident the connections between the phenomena of generation, degeneration, and regeneration. But, as in the debates over the experimental investigation of irritability, questions were raised over the artificial conditions under which these phenomena were produced and over whether they demonstrated the natural course of nature. If Haller and Blumenbach produced persuasive evidence for organic capacities of irritability and generation, not everyone was persuaded by their demonstrations, or that the tools and techniques they enlisted in their experimental reasoning were appropriate means for making sense of the phenomena of organic life.

The investigations of organic vitality to which Haller, Blumenbach, and their critics contributed thus contrast with the debates of the early 1790s through the constitutive, and controversial, role played by experiments. The debates surrounding Girtanner’s treatise took place in the terrain of texts. If experiments were enlisted in these debates, they were largely those of others. The experiments of Haller, Blumenbach, and others were cited as authoritative and their results were cited as established matters of fact, although those experiments were contested when first staged. As representations of organic vitality migrated from the space of practice into that of textbooks, their iteration turned the unstable results of earlier experiments into fixed concepts. In the context of a polemic, positions became entrenched and abstract principles reified. It was only with the controversy over Galvani’s experiments and with new investigations of comparatives modes of reproduction and organic functions, which became prominent in the German context from the mid-1790s, that experimental reasoning again became the means through which debates over organic vitality occurred. In the early 1790s, in the context of the polemic triggered by Girtanner’s treatise, experimental investigations of specific organic processes were superseded by declarations over the vital principles ruling the functioning of the whole organism.

LEBENSKRÄFTE TAKE CENTER STAGE

If Girtanner was the immediate target for much of the polemics over vital forces and principles, he was also a proxy for a wider set of concerns. Girtanner’s chemical explanation of organic vitality, his purported demonstration of oxygen as the basis for irritability, was immediately challenged for enlisting French chemistry at a time when it remained controversial among prominent German chemists. His claim that irritability was a general principle of life and the basis for a new medical system became embroiled in German debates concerning the medical system of the Scottish physician John Brown, which similarly singled out irritability as the principle of all phenomena of health and disease as a polemical alternative to medical systems focused on nerves and sensibility. Soon numerous reviews, articles, and monographs appeared, whose authors all positioned themselves against Girtanner’s treatise, and presented alternative arguments regarding the principles or powers of life necessary to explain the unique organization and functions of living organisms. The wave of publications crested in 1795, punctuated most strikingly by a detailed study by Christoph Wilhelm Friedrich Hufeland. A dispute that started through the provocation of a relatively minor figure thus developed to such an extent that one of Prussia’s most prominent physicians and medical professors offered his opinion on the matter.

To gain a wide perspective on the eruption of a debate over Lebenskräfte and Lebensprincipien in the early 1790s it is important to trace the debate not only through the series of monographs that appeared in rapid succession but also through the several journals that followed and fostered the debate. Two medical journals are particularly important. The Journal der Erfindungen, Theorien und Widersprüche in der Natur- und Arzneiwissenschaft (JE), launched in 1792 by the Erfurt medical professor August Friedrich Hecker, highlighted these debates by publishing lengthy critical reviews of Girtanner’s claims and favorable reviews of his opponents. Although the reviews in the journal were anonymous and, accordingly, claimed to speak in the name of a common public reason, it was widely recognized that the reviews were authored by Hecker; indeed, the journal served primarily as a medium for Hecker to savage theories of irritability, French chemistry, Brown’s medical system, and other theories to which he was personally opposed. The journal drew considerable attention for the polemical tone with which it attacked new medical and physiological ideas.⁴ But if its public, and especially its targets, often expressed dismay at its sarcastic tone and partisan critiques, it did identify important current controversies. The Medicinisch-Chirurgische Zeitung (MCZ) positioned itself in contrast to Hecker’s journal by offering less biased summaries of publications and more temperate critiques. Initiated by two Saltzburg physicians, Johann Jacob Hartenkeil and Franz Xavier Mezler, it rapidly extended its distribution throughout the German-speaking lands. It is a remarkable journal for its time; appearing weekly from 1790 to 1839, it provided some two thousand pages a year of reviews of books and periodicals published not only in German but also in French, English, and Italian. In its pages, one can trace the German response to Lavoisier’s chemistry and Brown’s medical system, and the significance of both to characterizations of organic vitality. The journal also demonstrates the extent to which questions regarding the nature of living organisms—questions regarding the organic properties of irritability, sensibility, and generation, and regarding the principles introduced to explain these properties—concerned German physicians, physiologists, and naturalists, as well as pharmacists, chemists, and physicists at the end of the eighteenth century. Contributions to the debate over vital principles and powers also appeared in leading general review journals, such as the Göttingische gelehrte Anzeigen (GGA) and the Jena-based Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung (ALZ) launched in Jena in 1785 by the professor of rhetoric Christian Gottfried Schütz and the publisher Johann Justin Bertruch. Associated with two of the leading German universities in the second half of the eighteenth century and drawing on their professorate as contributors, the GGA and ALZ appeared several times a week, reviewing works from literature, philosophy, and theology to medicine and chemistry. Addressed to men and women of letters, these review periodicals offered critical reports on contemporary issues.⁵ That they reviewed many of the works on principles of life or Lebenskräfte appearing in response to Girtanner’s treatise reveals the broader interest in the question of organic vitality among the general German reading public.

Girtanner was a medical writer based in Göttingen known for a well-received book on venereal disease when he published his “Abhandlungen über die Irritabilität.”⁶ He held an uneasy relationship with the scholarly community throughout his career. Although receiving his medical degree from Göttingen in 1782, he never obtained the professorship he sought. But he was not content to practice as a physician in his home town of St. Gallen in Switzerland. He came from a family of prominent merchants and bankers, and with the early death of his father he had sufficient means and independence to pursue other ambitions. He traveled for extended periods in the late 1780s to London, Cambridge, Edinburgh, and Paris, before settling in Göttingen as a writer. He was very prolific, despite being in poor health and dying early at the age of forty in 1800. He wrote several medical works and works on the new French chemistry and contributed reviews to the GGA. But he also dedicated much of his time to political history, writing biographies of historical leaders and editing two highly ambitious journals—Historischen Nachrichten und politischen Betrachtungen, über die französische Revolution from 1791 to 1797 and Politische Annalen from 1793 to 1794. Girtanner was a moderate political radical. Although he praised the judicious reforms promoted by the constitutional monarchist the Marquis de la Lafayette and supported the American Revolution and the Republic of Genova, his thirteen volumes of reports on the French Revolution were scathing critiques of the self-interest, corruption, and violence of its leaders. But it was his texts on physiology and chemistry, not politics, that sparked controversy.

Girtanner’s “Abhandlungen über die Irritabilität” set the tone for the subsequent debate by its bold pronouncement of the principle of life in organized nature. In the first part of the treatise, he declared irritability to be established as the fundamental principle of life by invoking the authority of Haller. Locating irritability and sensibility in particular fibers of the organized body, Girtanner affirmed irritability as the original, essential characteristic of living fibers distributed throughout the body, with the sensibility of nervous fibers as a secondary characteristic wholly dependent on irritability. Girtanner thus posited irritability as the basis of all the activity of life. He attributed irritability to plants and even to the fluids in the living body as manifested in their capacity to coagulate. He boldly asserted on the basis of repeated experiments and “known and generally acknowledged” facts (without actually specifying any) “that the irritable fiber is always the same, and in the whole of organized nature is subject to similar laws.”⁷ To represent his new physiological theory in scientific terms, he provided a formula to determine quantitatively the relationships between the irritability of a fiber, the force of the stimulus, and the habituation of the fiber to the stimulus. A substantive portion of the first part of his treatise presented an accounting of health and disease based on a balance or an excess or a deficiency of irritability. He offered an overview of common medical conditions, the actions of poisons and medicines, and the effects of a range of stimuli, all understood on the...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Note on Translations and Citations
• Introduction
• 1. Organic Vitality in the Late Eighteenth Century: Lebenskräfte and Experimental Reasoning
• 2. Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment: Organisms as Reciprocally Means and Ends of Themselves
• 3. Blurring the Boundaries of Life: Organic Vitality and Instruments of Inquiry in the 1790s
• 4. Jena Connections: A Science of Knowledge, Romantic Aesthetics, and Languages of Nature
• 5. Schelling’s Philosophy of Life: Boundary Concepts and the Natural History of the World Soul
• 6. The Science of Biology: Organic Vitality and the Boundaries of Life
• Conclusion: Afterlife
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index