Despite the seminal writings of Larry Holmes, Holger Maehle and others, the history of eighteenth-century experimental medicine, especially in America and Britain, has seen better days. Indeed, conference talks on nineteenth- and twentieth-century ‘biochemical’ laboratories often begin with disparaging remarks about the near-total absence of such work before 1800. Such a lack of awareness, unfortunately, has consequences for more mainstream historiographies, especially for historical figures whose experimental ideas figured in debates about health, religion and philosophy. One such person was the Swiss physician, author, poet and philosopher Albrecht von Haller (1708–77). As Hubert Steinke's Irritating Experiments clearly shows, paying attention to the experimental details can shed much light on the intellectual milieu of mid- to late eighteenth-century continental Europe. Haller was a best-selling medical celebrity. He wrote numerous textbooks, monographs, journal articles (including essays and book reviews), novels, poems and bibliographies. If these were not enough to whet the appetite of historians, he also left behind a wealth of manuscript letters, notebooks and lecture notes. Today he is principally remembered for the role that he played in developing the concept of ‘irritability’, understood as an inherent property of living matter which allowed it to contract upon irritation.

Based on my own research into William Paley's allergic reaction to the concept, I have found that most studies have approached Haller's thought via an evolutionary historiography that seeks to frame his research as a notable milestone on the long highway to Darwin. For the more philosophically inclined, Haller plays a similar role, but with stronger emphasis placed on the mind–body problem and the end point identified as Gilbert Ryle. In both of these traditions, Haller is merely a convenient example – a trope, so to speak, cited in reference to larger agenda. There have been several studies that have sought to address his thought on its own terms, but even these have treated his work in relation to subjects that would prove to be important for nineteenth- and twentieth-century biologists or philosophers. Within the anglophone literature little space has been devoted to excavating Haller's irritability thesis in relation to the larger scientific context of the day. It is precisely for this reason that Steinke's book will prove an extremely helpful source for those interested in the genesis, modification and popularization of the thesis.

Chapter 1 summarizes the physiological theories used to explain the movement of muscles. Steinke begins with Giorgio Baglivi, moves on to Hermann Boerhaave and ends with a prosopography of the latter's students. After his studies with Boerhaave, Haller was appointed professor of medicine at the newly established University of Göttingen. Using Haller's laboratory notebooks, Steinke in Chapter 2 lays out the experiments that led Haller to formulate the irritability thesis, with special attention being given to the role played by Haller's student assistants. Chapters 3 and 4 trace the movement of the thesis from his laboratory to the wider medical community, showing how Haller designed experiments that allowed him to respond to challenges and questions sent to him from all over Europe. Throughout, Steinke emphasizes that the perimeters of irritability were never completely set in Haller's mind and that, prompted by new evidence, he revised his stance at several points during his career. Chapter 5 expands the scope of the book by outlining how irritability played a significant part in philosophical and medical debates of the day. To give focus to his discussion, Steinke describes how the idea was accepted, rejected and modified by adherents of the three most prevalent medical models of the late eighteenth century: animism, mechanism and vitalism. To my mind, this is one of the more helpful treatments of this topic published in recent decades, benefiting from the book's early explication of irritability and showing how different national and linguistic communities reacted differently to the thesis.

For those more interested in the wider public sphere, Chapter 6 offers a fascinating treatment of how Hallerian irritability fared in book-review journals published throughout western Europe. Although Steinke does not explicitly draw out the significance of this form of print, his work on the subject will stimulate those interested in the history of medical and scientific literacy, especially since the birth of these review journals occurred at the same time that Europeans were switching from intensive to extensive reading habits. Drawing on his own research and the work of Anne Goldgar, Ute Schneider, Doris Kuhles and others, Steinke suggests that these journals can be classified into three types: those which reviewed national literatures, those which reviewed foreign literature and those which reviewed both. Since Haller's books were reviewed by journals that fell into all three of these categories, Steinke has much to say about how experimental controversies played out within different communities of readers. On this point he also makes several insightful observations about the types of review method that Haller promoted and discouraged when he edited the Göttingische gelehrte Anzeigen, the influential journal managed by the University of Göttingen's professors.

I liked this book. But, in fairness to light readers, I should say that it does drift off into some extremely detailed sections that dissect the manual and methodological intricacies of Haller's experiments, and although it is apparent that Steinke has read Ian Hacking, David Gooding and Peter Galison, it is sometimes not so obvious how his comments about them (especially in the footnotes) are relevant to Haller's experimental method. Even so, this book needed to be written, especially in English, because it fills a rather large hole in the history of laboratory-based medical theories, and also provides a helpful resource for those interested in the uptake of Haller's ideas throughout Europe. I have no doubt that I will be recommending it to historians at future conferences – especially those whose knowledge of laboratory-based medicine in the eighteenth century is limited to one or two examples of experimental physiology.