Among historians of science it has by now been widely acknowledged that there was no such thing as a strict separation between mechanism and vitalism in the sciences of the eighteenth century. It has also been argued – particularly in a French and German context – that vitalist natural philosophy permeated all aspects of cultural, moral and even economic life. What makes this new book on eighteenth-century vitalism valuable is its in-depth discussion of vitalist language and metaphor in the works of well-known eighteenth-century British thinkers such as Adam Smith, David Hume, Erasmus Darwin, John Thelwall and Mary Wollstonecraft. Packham's eloquent and learned study of these thinkers not only gives a convincing portrait of how ideas on ‘vital principles’ or life forces were debated within scientific contexts (as if we could separate these from society at large), but also shows that these ideas were widely available and discussed in eighteenth-century public life. She convincingly argues that it is no surprise that they were taken up in economic, political, literary and feminist writings. So the physiological argument that the body has within itself a restoring (vital) principle that re-establishes health and balance to the diseased body is reflected in the political ideas of Adam Smith, who argued that the health of the nation is best ensured when left to its own self-regulation. And the prominent attempts at, and debates about, reanimating dead bodies have their counterpart in the reformist politics of John Thelwall. He employed a language of vitality, animation, force and energy in his campaign for political reawakening.

Interesting also is Packham's last chapter on animation and vitality in women's writing of the 1790s. Comparing the early and late work of Mary Wollstonecraft, she not only argues that vitalist ideas gave an impulse to feminist calls for social reform, but in her discussion she also distinguishes eighteenth-century vitalism from nineteenth-century Romantic thought. Although eighteenth-century vitalist language might appear to resemble Romantic ideas on organic nature (in particular when such language is employed outside a scientific context), Packham maintains that they are both rooted in distinctly different understandings of the natural world. Based on Andrew Cunningham's distinction between ‘old’ theory-based physiology and ‘new’ post-1800 experimental physiology, Packham speculates that we must view the vitalist language employed in the 1790s by Darwin, Thelwall, Wollstonecraft and others not as a forerunner of Romantic thought, but as the tail end of eighteenth-century vitalism.

Whilst very strong in its analysis of vitalist language in literary and philosophical works, Eighteenth-Century Vitalism is weaker in its discussion of vitalism in contemporary medicine and natural philosophy. It is generally known that defining vitalism is a tricky business, but Packham's definition of vitalism as marking ‘the transitional period between the rejection of earlier mechanical models and the formalization of the modern sciences of life’ p. 2 is unsatisfactory. This decidedly vague understanding of vitalism as opposed to mechanism – or indeed a vitalism which was increasingly pushing away mechanical ideas of the body – does not pay heed to the complexities of both categories, which each incorporated within itself characteristics of the other. No one at the time was a straightforward mechanist – not even the influential Dutch medical teacher Herman Boerhaave, whom Packham presents as the arch-mechanist against whom all vitalists went to battle.

Packham's reduction of vitalism to a depot of uncontextualized vitalist concepts, images and languages, from which political and other thinkers borrowed at will, raises even greater difficulties. It is often doubtful whether the physiological theory that Packham points to can be understood as specifically ‘vitalist’. For instance, ideas about the body's self-healing capacities (adopted by Smith in his argument about self-regulation) can hardly be called ‘vitalist’. Ideas in this vein have been repeated ever since Hippocrates. The same goes for the reanimation theories employed by Thelwall. Medics of all ages – including those adhering to mechanist theories – have pondered the possibility of bringing dead bodies back to life.

Still, Packham's work is thought-provoking, if only because it is written from the perspective of literary scholarship. It points at sources and non-scientific arguments hitherto unexplored. This, and the ‘history-of-science shortcomings’ of Packham's work, show the importance of interdisciplinary dialogue.