from The Age of Wonder: Vitalism

The natural tendency of most English doctors and surgeons was to avoid too much theory and speculation. This evidently did not apply to Lawrence, or to his intellectual masters on the Continent. The great French naturalist Georges Cuvier approached all animal life as part of a continuous 'successive' development. The celebrated Parisian doctor Professor Xavier Bichat developed a fully materialist theory of the human body and mind in his lectures Physiological Researches on Life and Death, translated into English in 1816. Bichat defined life bleakly as 'the sum of the functions by which death is resisted: Even more radical were the 'Machine-Man' theories of the French physiologist Julien de la Mettrie. He argued that the theologian, with his `obscure studies, could say nothing intelligible about the soul, and that only physicians and surgeons were in a position to study the evidence. `They alone, calmly contemplating our soul, have caught it a thousand times unawares, in its misery and its grandeur, without either despising it in one state or admiring it in the other.' 16 William Lawrence was only waiting the opportunity to bring such radical ideas to bear. As part of his new professorship he was required to give the series of public lectures at the Royal College, starting in spring 1816. These immediately followed on the series given by Abernethy. It was the custom that one Hunterian Lecturer would preface his remarks with an appropriate salute to the endeavours of the previous incumbent. But on entering the lecture hall, after a few elegant throwaway compli-ments, Lawrence began roundly to attack Abernethy's theories. He stated bluntly that there was absolutely no such thing as a mysterious Life Principle, and that the human body is merely a complex physical organisation. In a phrase that became notorious, he claimed that the development of this physiological organisation could be observed unbroken, `from an oyster to a man'. Lawrence's references to Abernethy became steadily more aggressive and sardonic. 'To make the matter more intelligible, this vital principle is corn-pared to magnetism, to electricity, and to galvanism; or it is roundly stated to be oxygen. 'Tis like a camel, or like a whale, or like what you please ... This last was a contemptuous, and deliberately literary, allusion to Shakespeare's Hamlet mocking the foolish old Polonius. Other smart literary quotations came from the poems of Alexander Pope and John Milton. Lawrence eventually went on to broaden his attack. Science, he argued, had an autonomus right to express its views fearlessly and objectively, without interference from Church or state. It must avoid 'clouds of fears and hopes, desires and aversions'. It must 'discern objects clearly' and shun 'intellectual mist. It must dispel myth and dissipate 'absurd fables'. The world of scientific research was wholly independent. 'The theological doctrine of the soul, and its separate existence, has nothing to do with this physiological question ... An immaterial and spiritual being could not have been discovered amid the blood and filth of the dissecting room:  Finally he attacked the very nature of the religious, mystifying or unscientific philosophy which Abernethy appeared to be promulgating: 'It seems to me that this hypothesis or fiction of a subtle invisible matter, animating the visible textures of animal bodies, and directing their motions, is only an example of that propensity in the human mind, which had led men at all times to account for those phenomena, of which the causes are not obvious, by the mysterious aid of higher and imaginary beings: 214 As the controversy became more public, Lawrence was accused of personal betrayal, ingratitude and atheism. Between 1817 and 1819 he and Abernethy continued to exchange increasingly vitriolic views in their Royal College lectures, and student groups of supporters formed round each. Abernethy was the senior figure, but Lawrence would not back down, and published his lectures in a book that became notorious, his Natural History of Man (1819). It became clear that this was no ordinary academic wrangle, but that the subject in contention was the fundamental nature of human life. The larger implications were clearly social, political and even theological. There was also a strong overtone of imperial controversy: foreign versus British science. Thus Vitalism was the first great scientific issue that widely seized the public imagination in Britain, a premonition of the debate over Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection, exactly forty years later.