Joan Steigerwald. Organic Vitality: Experimenting At the Boundaries of Life. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 2019. 460 Pp., 34 Figures.

Summary

Upon the completion of an experiment on a dreary November night, a young doctor Frankenstein wrote 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; it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs.” Today, Frankenstein reads as a bizarre tale, albeit one with crucial implications about the monstrosity of humanity and the humanity of the supposedly monstrous. At the time when Mary Shelley wrote the novel, though, the sciences were animated by discussions about what precisely separated the living from the nonliving. This movement was known as vitalism: the belief that living matter was endowed with some “spark of being” and the attendant search for what that thing, that vital principle, might be.

Joan Steigerwald's monograph, Organic Vitality: Experimenting at the Boundaries of Life, is an interdisciplinary study of vitalism that investigates the intertwining of scientific and empirical inquiry, critical philosophy, and Romantic theory around the turn of the nineteenth century. Her entry into this topic is via the blooming periodical culture of Germany at this time: in a multitude of publications, there was a lively and critical debate concerning whether the vital principle or force in question might best be understood as irritability, sensibility, a reproductive force, or a more general Lebenskraft. These arguments were, in turn, situated within a longer history that called especially upon the authority of the Swiss polymath Albrecht von Haller and his experiments in the 1750s on irritability and sensibility (roughly, the innate capacity of the body to respond to external stimuli) and the equally multitalented Friedrich Blumenbach and his inquiries during the 1780s into generative processes, i.e., the capacity of organized bodies to grow or cultivate their own kind and the simultaneous ability to generate, maintain, and repair their own complex structures.