Historians of biology have long wrestled with how to understand the categories of “organic vitality” (Lebenskraft) and “organicism” in Germany from roughly the late eighteenth to the early nineteenth centuries. Scholarship by Timothy Lenoir, Robert Richards, John Zammito, and others has highlighted the impact of German idealism, romanticism, and studies of organic phenomena in a range of disciplines (chemistry, comparative physiology, etc.) on the forging of a new “science of life” during this period. Yet, as Joan Steigerwald explains in her erudite study, there remains a lingering tendency to use the term vitalist in order “to dismiss the contributions of a whole generation or whole group of physiologists and naturalists” (14). Indeed, she notes that it is still common to take sides, to classify historical actors “into vitalists or mechanists, according to historians’ conceptions—and often awkwardly, with some individuals appearing in different categories in different histories” (14). In some ways, the broader problem stems from what has been a protracted emphasis in the history of biology—and in the history of science more generally—on epistemic breaks or ruptures. Steigerwald points to the influence of Georges Canguilhem in this regard, and also to Michel Foucault; this contributed to a tendency to view biology in the nineteenth century as dramatically different from what then were labeled antiquated interests in “vitalism and organicism,” also “anatomy and classification” in eighteenth-century natural history (15).

While indebted to important studies focused on ruptures and shifts in the history of the life sciences, also the important recent studies of “epistemological concepts as objects that change historically” offered by Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison's book Objectivity (2007), Steigerwald frames her own analysis as “historically and culturally specific and limited” (38–39). Rather than making a dramatic break with the past her starting point, or the lens through which she approaches the German context around 1800, instead she makes the case that the term Lebenskraft “was used more broadly and critically as a synthetic expression for complexes of organic processes underlying the appearances of life” (15). In so doing, she offers readers an original account of what she describes as “epistemic reflections on the experimental investigations of life,” their relationship to critical and romantic philosophies and to the contemporary life sciences more generally (40).

Steigerwald begins her study with a deep dive into the striking number of German-language publications from the late eighteenth century focused on identifying “a specific principle” that could account for the unique characteristics of organic life. The authors of these publications deployed a range of concepts to help them define various aspects of this principle, including irritability, sensibility, generation, and reproductive force (41). The debates were especially intense, largely because of the explosion of German periodical culture in this period, including the establishment of specialized journals designed with specific target audiences in mind, that is, physicians, chemists, professors of medicine and physiology, and naturalists (42). Despite the ever-increasing variety of review publications, books, and authors participating in ongoing conversations about organic vitality in this period, Steigerwald treats mainly the reflections of Albrecht von Haller and Johann Friedrich Blumenbach because they were consistently considered to be the most authoritative. Both were professors of medicine at the University of Göttingen, were deeply involved with the publication of key journals on these topics, “had extended networks of students and correspondents who helped propagate their work,” and adopted experimental approaches to their investigations, using them strategically to buttress their claims (43–44).

From here, Steigerwald moves to a discussion of Immanuel Kant's participation in debates about organic vitality, which resulted in the creation of “the epistemic framework in which claims to understand organic vitality and to provide a science of life would need to be justified at the turn of the nineteenth century” (94). She juxtaposes Kant's relatively modest approach to broader questions about organization and purposiveness in nature and the “boundaries of life” with bold new approaches and claims made in the 1790s by those working mainly in the fields of chemistry and physiology. For example, in her third chapter she highlights the work of Johann Christian Reil and Christian Erhard Schmid in Halle, as well as Luigi Galvani's studies of “animal electricity,” and she considers its impact on Alexander von Humboldt and Johann Wilhelm Ritter, especially their efforts to study the “excitability” of organic bodies and their chemical conditions using frog legs (165–66) and even their own bodies (171–72). The end result was a striking cacophony of efforts to understand “the excitability of living tissue” and to place preliminary findings alongside the findings of those, such as Blumenbach, whose comparative approach to physiology stressed “the capacity of organic beings to respond variably to the contingencies of the physical world” while forming distinct kinds (205).

With more tools and creative approaches at their disposal, Steigerwald argues, “the border zone of life seemed to extend indefinitely, providing an expansive domain to explore experimentally” (205). The stage was set for the creation of new epistemic frameworks, including the creation of a new science of knowledge and a “natural history of the world soul,” the focus of chapter 5. Indeed, after exploring the common interests and questions animating the agendas of Goethe, Fichte, and Novalis in the university town of Jena in the 1790s, Steigerwald turns her attention to Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling's “philosophy of life,” which “attempted to make sense of the life of the world through intermediary or boundary concepts” and helped create what she calls a “productive epistemic orientation” (321–22) for those involved in defining biology as a specific domain of inquiry in the early years of the nineteenth century.

Although it might be tempting to single out the contributions of particular figures, such as Jean-Baptiste Lamarck or publications such as Gottfried Reinhold Treviranus's Biologie (1802–1822) as singular or even rupture moments in efforts to establish biology as a separate area of inquiry, by the time Steigerwald treats these figures in her final chapter, it is clear that their texts and concerns were shared widely and part of a “much broader epistemic shift” by 1800 (327). Of course, Steigerwald is mainly interested in the contributions of key German figures to ongoing efforts to create a new “science of life,” and there is much value to illuminating the teaching texts, journal articles, and experimental cultures of specifically German institutions. Yet introducing the figure of Lamarck in the final chapter raises questions about the pan-European qualities of these conversations, questions that are mostly not addressed in this study.

Steigerwald's project, with its emphasis on continuity, would benefit from further engagement with the work of Mary Terrall, Jessica Riskin, or even John Tresch's provocative The Romantic Machine (2012), which considers the interest in organic vitality in the French context and related investigations by Alexander von Humboldt and Auguste Comte. Additionally, while Steigerwald's book powerfully recovers and assimilates a variety of highly textured “epistemic reflections” that do indeed have much to offer to the history of the life sciences—including “its relationship to the physical sciences and to experimental technologies” (398)—the study focuses very little on actual techniques or practices. There are some notable exceptions to this in the discussions of von Haller's experiments on animals in Göttingen, for example, or descriptions of various Galvanic experiments. But how did acts of observing, collecting, and experimenting inform the texts that the figures highlighted in this study produced? And what about their broader networks of correspondents, recording and measuring devices?

The variety of inquiries and efforts to understand “organic vitality” circa 1800 was truly staggering, and Steigerwald offers expert guidance through what is a vast and varied field of inquiry. Importantly, she shows us how questions regarding organic vitality involved an interconnected range of concepts such as excitability, sensibility, and generation, but they were also deeply entangled with questions about how to study life, including what it means to manipulate natural processes using various techniques and instruments.