13. The Age of Wonder, by Richard Holmes, pp. 361-405

Davy and the Lamp, 4-6; Sorcerer and Apprentice, 1-5

_____

After yet another mine explosion that killed fifty-seven men in June 1815, the Coal Mines Safety Committee put out an urgent call for Humphry Davy's help. So on August 24, Davy went to Newcastle to see what he could do. The working theory was that fire-damp needed to be somehow neutralized directly, perhaps with better ventilation or some other kind of gas pumped into the mine. But Davy turned the problem around: He looked at what was touching off the explosions -- the candles and oil lamps that the miners carried into the darkness.

First, however, he needed to analyze the gas and its properties, so he took bottled samples to the Royal Institution laboratory and, working with Faraday, began to study the properties of methane. He discovered that it would explode only when it reached a critical proportion of one part gas to eight parts air, and that the temperature at which the explosion occurred was quite high. With this information he could proceed to designing a lamp that would not set off an explosion. He learned that a lamp with a glass chimney sealed around the wick and with narrow metal tubes to let in air would not set off an explosion. It was a trial-and-error process that led to several explosions but he had three working prototypes ready at the end of October. He wrote to Banks about his success and sent the lamps to the Royal Society along with a scientific paper to be read on November 9.

But Davy continued to refine his invention. He and Faraday continued to work through Christmas and by January 11 he was ready to report his results to the Royal Society. He had discovered that the lamp worked even better when the wick was surrounded by a fine-gauge wire mesh instead of a sealed glass chimney. The apertures in the mesh fed air to the flame and at the same time contained and cooled it below the temperature needed to ignite the methane. Without the need for a glass chimney, the lamp was cheaper and sturdier. Davy also used the process by which the lamp was designed as an example of the scientific inductive method, writing: "Every step was furnished by experiment and induction, in which nothing can be said to be owing to accident, and in which the most simple and useful combination arose out of the most complicated circumstances." Holmes comments, "This refusal to allow anything to chance, 'accident' or good fortune was exactly the same as Herschel's insistence that chance played no part in the discovery of Uranus."

The Davy Safety Lamp was swiftly adopted all over Britain and Europe. Davy himself went down the mine at Walls End in Northumberland and demonstrated its use to the miners, pointing out that the flame itself could indicate the presence of methane: "His lamp not only caged the flame, it transformed it into a canary." He received the Rumford Medal from the Royal Society in 1817 and was made a baronet the following year, but he refused to take out a patent on the lamp. He published an account of the research, On the Safety Lamp for Miners, With Some Researches Into Flame in 1818, setting forth his belief that science could be a force for human betterment.

The gratification of the love of knowledge is delightful to every refined mind; but a much higher motive is offered in indulging it, when that knowledge is felt to be practical power, and when that power may be applied to lessen the miseries or increase the comforts of our fellow-creatures. 

But in spring 1816, he was charged with plagiarizing his design from George Stephenson, an engineer, who had tested his own safety lamp in October 1815 and presented his invention to the Newcastle Literary and Philosophical Society in December. Stephenson had suspected plagiarism when he saw reports of Davy's first lamp, the one with metal tubes instead of wire gauze, in the Newcastle papers. Stephenson's lamp also used tubes and perforations. When the Newcastle Society demonstrated Davy's gauze lamp side-by-side with Stephenson's in February 1816, it was obvious that the two lamps were different, but the controversy couldn't be stopped. There was something of a battle of North versus South involved as well. Stephenson would go on to his own fame as an inventor with the "Stephenson Rocket," an early steam-powered railway engine. He admitted that he hadn't studied the properties of methane and that his lamp was the result of trial and error. But Davy got his back up over Stephenson's claims and "never acknowledged that the over-hasty publication of his early prototypes had caused much of the problem." But even though Banks issued a firm statement in November 1817 that the Royal Society had investigated the claims and tested both lamps and concluded that Davy was the sole inventor, the controversy never died.

In May  1818, the Davys left on another European tour, planning to travel for two years. It was partly an attempt to patch up their marriage, which had been put to the test by celebrity. It was in the Balkans, in what is now the Slovenian capital of Ljubljana, that Davy had his second sighting of the "dream girl" of his feverish vision in 1808. This time she was fifteen-year-old Josephine Dettela, the daughter of an innkeeper. He dismissed it as an insignificant coincidence, though he would later write about it. They moved on to visit Lord Byron at Ravenna and then settled in Naples for the winter, about the same time as Shelley and his family, though there is no record that Davy and Shelley ever met. In spring 1819, they started north again, but Jane announced that she was ill and tired of traveling and wanted to stay in Paris. There Davy heard that Joseph Banks was also ill.

Banks had been increasingly immobilized by gout, but he continued to single out young protégés, including John Herschel, who had distinguished himself at Cambridge as a mathematician and had published a paper on mathematical formulae before his twenty-first birthday. Banks had John Herschel elected to the Royal Society in 1813. Another protégé was the zoologist Charles Waterton, who had made several journeys to South America. Banks urged Waterton, who was thirty-seven, to settle down and write the account of his journeys, something that Banks himself had failed to do. Waterton complied, and produced "a popular masterpiece," Wanderings in South America, in 1825.

In his old age, Banks had become more conservative. Although he honored women such as Caroline Herschel, he was opposed to letting women be elected to the Royal Society. And he was shocked at Byron's "Lascivious" Don Juan, which began appearing in 1819. Despite his own early distaste for slavery, he would not commit the Royal Society to abolishing it. His attitude toward slavery was not that it was a moral evil but that it was an inefficient way to manage labor: "Slavery must be abolished not on moral principles, which are in my opinion incapable of being maintained in argument, but on Commercial ones which weigh equally in moral & immoral minds." On the other hand, he hailed the revolution in Haiti: "To see a sort of Human Beings emerging from Slavery & making the most rapid Strides towards the perfection of Civilization, must I think be the most delightful of all Food for Contemplation."

Despite his early success, John Herschel was still undecided about what direction his life should take. His aunt, Caroline, was his confidante, and met his brilliant Cambridge friends, the mathematician Charles Babbage and the geologist William Whewell. But John was undecided whether to remain as a fellow at Cambridge and do pure mathematics, or to practice law in London, a career that he thought would allow him to doscientific research in chemistry and geology in his spare time. But his father discouraged him from both courses, considering law beneath him and university life too self-indulgent. He suggested that John become a clergyman. And William brushed off John's reaction that he didn't believe in the doctrine of the Anglican church, arguing, "The most conscientious clergyman may preach a sermon full of sound morality, and no one will enquire into theological subtleties."

The argument between the young man and his seventy-five-year-old father became heated, but finally William gave in and agreed that John should try out the law at Lincoln's Inn and go to regular meetings at the Royal Society. He was proved right about the law: John didn't like it, and went back to Cambridge first as a mathematics tutor and then as a fellow. But by the summer of 1816 he had decided that science was his real career. William gave his son a generous income to pursue whatever research he chose, and he joined his father and his aunt at Slough in running the observatory. In 1819 he presented his first paper, correcting Newton's ideas on polarized light, to the Royal Society. 

William Herschel's discoveries had caught the imagination of Shelley, who used them to bolster his own arguments against religion. If the cosmos was as unimaginably vast as Herschel suggested, it only showed the narrowness of the biblical account of fall and redemption. He wrote in "On the Plurality of Worlds," a note to Queen Mab:

The indefinite immensity of the universe, is the most aweful subject of contemplation.... It is impossible to believe that the Spirit that pervades this infinite machine begat a son upon the body of a Jewish woman.... The works of His fingers have borne witness against him.

He continued in this vein in other prose works, and Prometheus Unbound "revels in Herschel's new cosmology and Davy's chemistry." In it, the moon sings a song to Earth that "elegantly includes scientific notions of gravitational orbit, tidal attractions and magnetic fields."

In his last years at the Royal Society, Banks began to see the growth of science challenge his ability to keep it all under the aegis of one body. He fought against such spinoffs as the Geological Society and the Astronomical Society. It was John Herschel and Charles Babbage who were leading the formation of the latter, a step toward the compartmentalism and professionalizing of the scientific disciplines that had already begun at the universities. Banks himself was somewhat to blame for this reaction against the Royal Society's attempt to unify all the sciences in one body. Under his leadership, the membership had come to consist of such non-scientists or at best amateur scientists as clergymen (10 percent of the membership) and landed aristocrats (nearly 20 percent).  Younger members chafed against what they felt as the "stifling consensus, cautious propriety and snobbish exclusion" of the society, which had yet to recognize the achievements of chemists like John Dalton and Michael Faraday.

Banks did, however, continue to encourage his protégés, such as William Edward Parry's polar expedition through Baffin Bay, in an attempt to discover the Northwest Passage. He was also interested in setting up an observatory in South Africa, at the Cape. But in the spring of 1820 he became seriously ill with jaundice and submitted his resignation. The Society rejected it, but Banks died on June 19, 1820, having served more than forty years as president.

Davy returned to London only three days before Banks's death. He was widely regarded as the logical successor to Banks, and he wanted the job. But his marriage was still troubled, and taking on the responsibility of leading the Royal Society was not likely to please Jane. They agreed to stay together but to lead separate lives except when official events made it necessary for them to make an appearance together. They moved into a larger house that would allow them independence from each other.

The choice of Davy was not unanimous: "Aristocratic members were uneasy at Davy's Cornish background (so different from Banks's Eton and Oxford), while younger members, on the contrary, wondered if his social ambitions had overtaken his scientific ones." There was an alternative: the chemist William Hyde Wollaston, who became acting president on Banks's death. John Herschel supported this choice, writing to Babbage that Davy was "said to be arrogant in the extreme, and impatient of opposition to his scientific views, and likely, if power were placed in his hand to oppose rising merit in his own line." Davy's dispute with Gay-Lussac was also cited as evidence against him.

Nevertheless, Davy was elected without opposition in November 1820. In his opening addresses he singled out the fields where he thought the most promising new work lay: "astronomy, polar exploration, the physics of heat and light, electricity and magnetism, geology, and the physiology of plants and animals." He praised Wollaston, Dalton, and John Herschel, and voted to fund Charles Babbage's "difference engine," the precursor of the calculator. John was also awarded the Copley Medal for his work on polarized light. But Davy also offended some by publishing some remarks about Banks that seemed to characterize his predecessor as "a dilettante and a patriarch."

And his treatment of Michael Faraday, his former star pupil, was surprising: He blackballed Faraday's election as a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1823, even though Faraday had already been elected to the Accademia in Florence and the Académie des Sciences in Paris. The reason Davy presented was that Faraday had plagiarized some of Wollaston's experiments in electromagnetic rotation and claimed that he had achieved the results first. But Faraday was already a recognized authority in the field and the plagiarism seems to have been unintentional -- even Wollaston was unconcerned about it, and later supported Faraday's election. Faraday's name was resubmitted eleven times until he was finally elected in 1824, with one vote against him -- presumably Davy's. Gossip even got out that Davy had intentionally suggested an experiment that had almost blinded Faraday. 

But Davy's work in encouraging the government's support of science was significant. He became a trustee of the British Museum, helping develop its collections and bringing more scientific exhibitions to it, making it more accessible to the public. He supported the formation of the Royal Zoological Society and the creation of a zoo in Regent's Park. He was also a founder of the Athenaeum Club, though he once again used it to commit an apparent snub of Faraday, having him appointed Club Secretary. When Faraday discovered it was essentially a clerical job, he quit. But finally he was forced to give his approval to Faraday's appointment as director of the Royal Institution, which would make Faraday world-famous.

12. The Age of Wonder, by Richard Holmes, pp. 325-361

Dr Frankenstein and the Soul, 4-7; Davy and the Lamp, 1-3

_____

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus was "the most singular literary response to the Vitalism debate." She had heard Davy lecture on chemistry in 1812, when she was only fourteen, and when she came to write her novel she would draw on the published version of Davy's "Introductory Discourse" in the part where the young medical student Victor Frankenstein hears Prof. Waldman lecture. Percy Shelley, with whom she  eloped to France and Switzerland in 1814, was fascinated by the question of creating artificial life, and during their stay at Villa Diodati on Lake Geneva in 1816, they discussed Aldini's galvanic experiments with Byron and Polidori. It was then that they set each other a challenge to write a tale of horror. The others dashed off their responses, but Mary took her time -- fourteen months. In August 1817, she sent the manuscript of Frankenstein to the publisher three weeks before she gave birth to a daughter, Clara.

The character of Victor Frankenstein evokes many of the age's scientists: Joseph Priestley, Henry Cavendish, Humphry Davy, "the sinister Aldini and the glamorous, iconoclastic William Lawrence may all have contributed something to the portrait." The best-known German physiologist of the day was Johann William Ritter, who was "known for certain undefined 'galvanic' experiments with animals, which were the talk of the Royal Society, although amidst a certain amount of head-shaking." Ritter became the target of the Prussian government for his experiments and moved to Munich, but "he died penniless and insane in 1810, aged thirty-three. In other circumstances his Memoirs might have been those of young Victor Frankenstein."

In developing the character of the Creature in her novel, Mary was forced to speculate on what ways it might be considered human: "Would it have language, would it have a moral conscience, would it have human feelings and sympathies, would it have a soul?" It's possible that Mary accompanied her husband to his consultations with Lawrence in spring 1817, and that the three of them discussed such questions, because "Mary Shelley's idea of the mind was, like Lawrence's, based on the notion of the strictly physical evolution of the brain." In his lectures in 1817, Lawrence directly addressed the question of "mind":

Where is the 'mind' of the foetus? Where is that of a child just born? Do we not see it actually built up before our eyes by the actions of the five external senses, and of the gradually developed internal faculties? Do we not trace it advancing by a slow progress from infancy and childhood to the perfect expansion of its faculties in the adult.

The Creature in the novel has the body of a fully developed man, but his mind is that of an infant. He has to acquire memories, language, a conscience. "Although galvanised into life by a voltaic spark, the Creature has no 'divine spark' from Heaven. Yet perhaps his life cold be called, in a phrase of the medical student John Keats, a 'vale of soul-making.'" (Note: Keats's image of life as a process of soul-construction persisted into the twentieth century in the poems of W.B. Yeats; see e.g. "Beggar to Beggar Cried," "Sailing to Byzantium," and especially the great valedictory of "The Tower.") Escaping from the laboratory, the Creature begins his process of awareness with a sighting of the moon. His mind, he tells us, "received, every day, additional ideas." Holmes notes that "Mary's account [of the Creature's evolution "through all the primitive stages of man"] is almost anthropological, reminiscent of Banks's account of the Tahitians."

It is solitude that proves the undoing of the Creature and turns him into a killer. He pleads with Frankenstein to create a mate for him, "offering to go westwards to South America or the Pacific, and to return to that primitive Edenic state glimpsed by Cook and Banks." But Frankenstein, in the midst of creating the mate for the Creature, is attacked by fears that they would propagate "a race of devils," so he destroys the half-finished female Creature. Frankenstein is pursued by the Creature to the North Pole, "the antithesis of the warm, Pacific paradise," where "both see themselves as fallen angels, doomed to eternal solitude and destruction."

The first publication of the novel was a failure, selling fewer than 500 copies. But it became famous in the 1820s through stage adaptations, of which there were at least five, starting with Presumption: or The Fate of Frankenstein in London in 1823. "Over the next four years there were fourteen separate productions, mounted in London, Bristol, Paris and New York." Mary Shelley made no money from the plays, which she didn't authorize, but "when she herself went to see the play in September 1823 she loved it." The actor T.P. Cooke became famous in the role of the Creature, just as Boris Karloff would in the 1931 film version. But the dramatizations turned Victor Frankenstein from "a romantic and idealistic figure, obsessive rather than evil, and determined to benefit mankind" into "the archetypal mad and evil scientist." And the Creature, which eventually became "The Monster," "is deprived of all words, whereas in the novel he is superbly and tragically articulate."

As for William Lawrence, whose quarrel with Abernethy had sparked so much debate, he renounced his own views and reconciled with Abernethy. He became a member of the conservative Council of the Royal College of Surgeons in 1829 and "finished his career as Surgeon-General to Queen Victoria, and was created a baronet. But perhaps he had lost his own soul."

In the spring of 1811, Humphry Davy met Jane Apreece, a wealthy thirty-one-year-old widow. (Her first husband died in 1809. They had no children.) She was socially prominent and well-connected, and claimed to be the model for the heroine of Madame de Staël's novel Corinne, having met de Staël in Geneva. She had once dined with William Blake and was a cousin of Walter Scott. As their attraction grew, their "friends predicted disaster. She was made for society, he was made for the laboratory." She turned down his proposals twice, but finally accepted after he told her that the Prince Regent had offered him a knighthood -- he would be the first scientist to be knighted since Isaac Newton. He received the honor on April 8, 1812, and three days later they were married.

On June 1 his book Elements of Chemical Philosophy, based on his Royal Institution lectures, "was published with a formal dedication to Lady Jane Davy." Though the rest of the book was too technical for the general reader, its introduction, "An Historical View of the Progress of Chemistry," helped popularize chemistry. "Percy Shelley began to incorporate Davy's ideas into his work, beginning with his visionary materialist poem Queen Mab of 1812, with its long scientific prose notes." But the advances in science increasingly made it difficult for poets to express scientific ideas in verse. "Shelley's Prometheus Unbound (1820) was to be arguably the last successful attempt to combine the two in a major English poem." In his essay on the history of chemistry, Davy proclaimed,

The ends of this branch of knowledge are the applications of natural substances to new uses, for increasing the comforts and enjoyments of man; and for the demonstrating of the order, harmony, and intelligent design for of the system of the earth.

Setting aside that still-problematic notion of "intelligent design," Davy had made the case for amateur enthusiasts for chemistry, and the first "chemistry sets" went on the market at about this time.

Davy decided to give up his lectureship and pursue his scientific research independently, which Jane's fortune allowed him to do. He began investigating explosives as part of the British war effort, but in November 1812 he was partly blinded when a test tube exploded and sent glass slivers into his eye. As a celebrity he was subject to gossip, including a rumor that his wound was the result of a fight with Jane. When he returned to the Royal Institution laboratory in London, he found that it had been allowed to degenerate. He fired the laboratory assistant and hired a new one, twenty-one-year old Michael Faraday, who had been working as a bookbinder.

There was some tension between the Davys, mostly centered on the conflict between her socializing and his laboratory work, and his tendency to escape into his hobby of fly-fishing. But he made an effort to participate in her social life, and in 1813 he was introduced to the lion of society, Lord Byron. "Unexpectedly, Byron and Davy hit it off rather well, and later when His Lordship was self-exiled in Italy, Davy remained one of the few Englishmen that he could stand to meet. He would even put him in his poem Don Juan (1819-24)." (Along with, it might be noted, a reference to Mungo Park's travels.)

This is the patent age of new inventions
For killing bodies, and for saving souls,
All propagated with the best intentions:
Sir Humphry Davy's lantern, by which coals
Are safely mined for in the mode he mentions,
Tombuctoo travels, voyages to the Poles
Are ways to benefit mankind, as true,
Perhaps, as shooting them at Waterloo.

In May 1812, an explosion in the Felling coal mine killed ninety-two men, and after another explosion in the same mine in December 1813 killed twenty-two more, it became apparent that something needed to be done urgently about the problem of "fire-damp," a lethal gas from new coal seams that could be ignited by a single candle flame. The consensus was that Davy should be called on to find a solution to the problem. But the Davys had just embarked on an eighteen-month tour of Europe, accompanied by Michael Faraday, whom Davy had singled out as a promising research assistant. Jane, on the other hand, decided to treat Faraday as a valet, since her husband refused to travel with one. In Paris, Davy was awarded the Prix Napoléon by the Institut de France, which caused him to be denounced as unpatriotic, although "Davy carefully avoided an audience with Napoleon himself, and referred to him contemptuously as 'the Corsican robber.'" He was also lured by the Académie des Sciences into a competition with the eminent French chemist Joseph Gay-Lussac, to analyze a crystal substance that was a byproduct of gunpowder manufacture. Both Davy and Gay-Lussac identified the substance as a new element, iodine. But a dispute arose after Gay-Lussac's paper was presented on December 12 and Davy's on December 13. Davy backdated his paper to December 11 when it was published in the Journal de Physique, and claimed that he had shared his ideas with Gay-Lussac before the French chemist presented his conclusions. The French still insist that Gay-Lussac was the first to identify the element.

In the spring of 1814, the party moved south. In Florence, Davy used a magnifying lens to set a diamond on fire, demonstrating that the jewel was after all just carbon. They moved on to Rome and Naples, then northward to Venice and, for the summer, crossed the Alps into Switzerland, Bavaria, and Austria, then down into one of his favorite regions in the Balkans, then known as Illyria. They returned to Florence in October, where they heard about "some strange natural gases escaping from rock formations in the Apennines at Pietra Mala, near Lucca." They were fascinated by the gas, which could even be produced by stirring the mud with a stick and burned with a blue flame. The gas had almost no smell. They bottled some of it and took it back to Florence, where they identified it as methane -- the "fire-damp" that had caused the coalmine explosions.

Finally, in March 1815, news arrived that Napoleon had escaped from Elba. They hurriedly returned to London, where Davy saw to it that Faraday was promoted to assistant to the laboratory at the Royal Institution, and encouraged him to start giving his own lectures on chemistry and to publish his first papers. Davy himself became vice-president of the Institution, giving him access to the lab and the opportunity to continue to work with his protégé, Faraday.

Davy then wrote a poem called "The Massy Pillars of the Earth":

Nothing is lost; the ethereal fire,
Which from the farthest star descends,
Through the immensity of space
Its course by worlds attracted bends,

To reach the earth; the eternal laws
Preserve one glorious wise design;
Order amidst confusion flows
And all the system is divine.

If matter cannot be destroyed,
Then living mind can never die;
If e'en creative when alloy'd,
How sure is immortality! 

Holmes notes that the first stanza seems to anticipate Einstein's theory, a hundred years later, that light is bent by gravity, confirmed by Arthur Stanley Eddington's observations during a solar eclipse in 1819. But Davy was really just affirming "a more traditional belief: the sudden confidence that 'eternal laws' govern the universe in a benign and ordered way." His assertion that "all the system is divine" is "somewhere between Romantic pantheism and the old Enlightenment deism." He also continued to question the surety of immortality.

What is striking about this poem is its sudden tone of Evangelical self-confidence and its unusually hymn-like form. It could have been written by John Wesley or Isaac Watts, though Davy carefully avoids the words "God" or "soul." ... Perhaps he wanted to settle down theologically, as well as socially. But science would never quite allow him to do either.

11. The Age of Wonder, by Richard Holmes, pp. 295-325

Davy on the Gas, 11-12; Dr Frankenstein and the Soul, 1-3

_____

Davy's first Bakerian Lecture at the Royal Society, in November 1806, caused an international sensation. The topic was the revolutionary possibilities of the new field of electrochemical analysis. Challenging the notion that electricity was some kind of invisible fluid, he established that it was a form of bipolar energy, with positive and negative charges, and that it could be used to analyze substances into their components, which were entirely new elements. Surveying the scientific work going on elsewhere in Europe, he asserted that British chemistry now led the scientific world. The following November, he announced the discovery of two new elements, potassium and sodium, from his experiments using voltaic batteries to decompose soda and potash. Joseph Banks was so impressed with Davy's work that when he had his portrait painted the following year, he was shown holding a copy of Davy's Bakerian Lectures.

Joseph Banks in 1809, by Thomas Phillips

Banks fell seriously ill soon after these lectures. He had been working on a ventilation system for Newgate Prison and came down a form of typhus known as "jail fever" because it was so easily spread by lice in crowded prisons. He was away from his laboratory until April 1808. During his convalescence, he worked with Coleridge, who had been debilitated by opium, on the lecture series "Poetry and the Imagination," which Coleridge delivered at the Royal Institution in the spring of 1808. Davy also reported a hallucination of a beautiful woman who had nursed him at the height of his fever. He would later claim that he met her again in 1818 and in 1827-28, noting the ten-year cycle of recurrence that took place each time he started a new decade, turning thirty, then forty, then fifty. Holmes notes, "If there had been an earlier one, it would have been in 1798, when he turned twenty, and had just met Anna Beddoes. Anna had returned to her husband and was nursing him when he died in December 1808. After his death, she moved to Bath and then finally settled in Rome. Their son Thomas Lovell Beddoes became a poet, spending twenty-five years on a long poem called Death's Jest-Book, some of the imagery of which was drawn from his childhood memories of his father's laboratory. He committed suicide in 1849, at the age of forty-five.

In 1810 Davy went to Dublin for a series of hugely popular lectures, and he returned in 1811 to receive an honorary doctorate from Trinity College.

In these lectures he particularly stressed the importance of scientific knowledge for women's education, and for "the improvement of the female mind." Milton was wrong on the subject, and Mary Wollstonecraft was right. Among his attentive and admiring audiences was a strikingly pretty and vivacious Scottish widow called Jane Apreece. At a glittering reception afterwards, Jane Apreece told Humphry Davy that she loved fishing. 

In September 1811, Fanny Burney underwent a mastectomy in Paris without anesthetic. It was successful -- she lived twenty years longer -- but the pain was so excruciating that she wrote a 10,000-word letter to her sister about the ordeal, through which she had remained conscious except for "two total chasms in my memory." Even recalling the experience was so painful that it took her two months to write the letter, which is a remarkable glimpse at the the state of medical practice, especially surgery, at the time.

Although France was considered the leader in medicine at the time, England and Scotland were gaining renown, especially for the teaching hospitals of London and Edinburgh. Once again, Banks was concerned with promoting British prestige, and when Astley Cooper of Guy's Hospital perforated a patient's eardrum to treat a potentially fatal infection of the inner ear, Banks had it written up for the Royal Society's Philosophical Transactions. Cooper became a member of the Royal Society and was awarded the Copley Medal in 1814. One of Cooper's students was John Keats. Other Romantic poets also had medical connections: Coleridge was treated by John Abernethy of St. Bartholomew's for his opium addiction, and Joseph Henry Green of Guy's was his amanuensis in 1818. Byron's traveling companion was William Polidori, who had become a doctor at Edinburgh Hospital.

One of Banks's medical protégés was William Lawrence, a young surgeon who worked under John Abernethy at St. Bartholomew's. Lawrence was a specialist in comparative anatomy, and he was elected to the Royal Society at the age of thirty. Two years later, in 1815, he became professor of anatomy at the Royal College of Surgeons. In 1814, Lawrence's mentor, Abernethy, gave a series of lectures known as the Hunterian Orations in honor of John Hunter, who had accumulated a great collection of anatomical specimens. Hunter's collection demonstrated clearly the kinship between human beings and "lower species," leading to the conclusion that mankind had developed out of the animal kingdom. Abernethy had come across papers in Hunter's collection that speculated on the nature of life itself. From these speculations, "Abernethy proposed a theory of human life based on a semi-mystical concept of a universal, physiological life force" and even "suggested that this theory brought scientific evidence -- if not exactly proof -- to the theological notion of the soul." He also connected Davy's experiments with electricity to this theory of the life force.

But in 1816, it was Abernethy's student, Lawrence, who led a vociferous attack on the "life force" theory. Abernethy felt betrayed: Lawrence had been his assistant since the age of sixteen, and had even lodged with Abernethy for three years. Still, Lawrence had also studied anthropology with Johann Friedrich Blumenbach at the University of Göttingen and was well read in French medical literature. "If not an avowed atheist, he had little time for conventional pieties." Blumenbach had not gone so far as to deny the existence of the soul, but his work tended in the direction of a materialist view of life itself. He was also interested in the comparative study of "racial types," and Lawrence had translated Blumenbach's Comparative Anatomy into English in 1807.

Like Abernethy, Lawrence was also friends with a poet: Percy Bysshe Shelley, who consulted Lawrence in July 1815 on a variety of nervous disorders. Shelley, then twenty-two, was grateful for Lawrence's advice and treatment, and by September 1815 began his long poem Alastor, or The Spirit of Solitude about the search for self, wrote some essay on the nature of life and death, and his "Essay on a Future State." He continued seeing Lawrence until he and his wife, Mary, left England for Italy, whose climate Lawrence had recommended, in 1818. 

It was Lawrence who was tapped for the Hunterian Lectures in 1816, and instead of performing the usual courtesy toward the previous lecturer, he began by attacking Abernethy and the theory of the life force. The human body, he asserted, was just "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.'" He moved from attacking Abernethy to arguing that science, as Holmes puts it, "had an autonomous right to express its views fearlessly and objectively, without interference from Church or state." In his own words,

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.

In 1819, Lawrence continued his attack on Vitalism, as Abernethy's life force theory was called, in a book, Natural History of Man, sparking a debate that had political, social and theological implications, "a premonition of the debate over Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection, exactly forty years later."

In fact, there was nothing really new about the Vitalism debate. It had been anticipated in the 1780s by the vogue for mesmerism, which had been debunked by a series of blind trials. (Among other things, the trials provided the first demonstration of the "placebo effect," in which patients grew better simply because they believed they were being cured. Vitalism, however, got a boost from the ideas of Friedrich Schelling, who posited that "the whole world was indeed replete with spiritual energy or soul, and all physical objects 'aspired' to become something higher." This theory of evolution by aspiration was eventually laughed into extinction.

In 1803, Giovanni Aldini, a professor of anatomy from Bologna, did a series of public experiments with electricity on corpses, including an attempt to revive a hanged murderer six hours after his execution. The press reported that the electrical charges caused the muscles of the corpse to contract, the left eye to open, the fists to clench, and even made the body blow out a candle several times. "That small, grotesque detail of the opening eye may well have caught a young novelist's imagination." Further experiments on dead animals and "another human corpse which was said to have laughed and walked," caused such an outrage that Aldini was forced to leave the country.

The political implications of this quarrel over Vitalism took their character from the Napoleonic era: "Here was humane, pious English science fighting against cruel, reductive, atheistical French science." The conservative Quarterly Review, which is best known today for its savage attacks on the younger Romantic poets, weighed in with a scathing denunciation of Lawrence: "Mr Lawrence strives with all his powers to prove that men have no souls!" it fumed.

The debate also spread among the poets, and some of their comments, taken out of context, seem to suggest that they came down on the anti-science side. In December 1817, the painter Benjamin Haydon hosted a dinner at which Wordsworth, Charles Lamb, and Keats were present to celebrate Haydon's completion of part of his huge painting of Christ's entry into Jerusalem. The painting included portraits of Wordsworth (representing "natural English piety), Newton ("analytical science")  and Voltaire ("godless French philosophical scepticism"). Keats also appears in profile. Haydon recorded that the conversation centered on a debate over reason versus imagination, with the poets coming down on the side of imagination. He reported that Keats said Newton had "destroyed all the poetry of the rainbow, by reducing it to a prism." But Haydon was a devout fundamentalist Christian who "believed that most science was inevitably godless," and he may have biased his account accordingly.

Wordsworth is often cited as anti-science because of his poem "The Tables Turned," in which he refers to the "meddling intellect" and charges that scientists "murder to dissect." But Wordsworth also regarded Newton as a hero, celebrating him in The Prelude. Shelley, who was not present at the dinner, had previously twitted Haydon for his "religious superstitions" and referred to "that most detestable religion, the Christian." Like Coleridge, Shelley always defended science. Coleridge continued to argue that the soul existed, but he also rejected the idea of a "life force" as a physical fluid of some sort. He wrangled with the notion of the soul, which he identified as "the moral conscience and the spiritual identity."

Keats, from his medical studies under Cooper and J.H. Green, "undoubtedly knew more about medical, chemical and dissection procedures -- as well as the Vitalism debate itself -- than anyone else at Haydon's dinner party. His witticism at Newton's expense could be seen as the typical knowing humor of a clever medical student." But he did express some ambivalence about science in his poetry, particularly in "Lamia."

... Do not all charms fly
At the mere touch of cold philosophy?
There was an awful rainbow once in heaven:
We know her woof, her texture; she is given
In the dull catalogue of common things.
Philosophy will clip an Angel's wings....
Unweave a rainbow, as it erstwhile made
The tender-personed Lamia melt into a shade.

But the poem shows Lamia, a serpent-woman, to be something other than "tender-personed." She is an alien life-form, "both sexually alluring and yet clearly menacing and 'demonic.'" She is unnatural, and a "scientific" approach to her would have unmasked that fact. "Lamia" is a richly ambiguous poem that eventually undermines the anti-scientific position expressed in the lines above. Holmes asserts that the poem "engages many of the moral issues surrounding Vitalism, the nature of life, and the notion of human consciousness. Above all, perhaps, it asks if the beautiful Lamia has a soul."