Name: sarah lander

Semester: 6th SEMESTER

Electrophysiology, Vitalism and the Berlin Physical

society
Vitalism and the Berlin Physical Society
By the 19th century vitalism had developed into the view that physiological processes are the
product of emergent vital forces that are distinct from the physical and chemical forces of
attraction and repulsion. This was the view held by Xavier Bichat (1771-1802), who claimed
that vital processes could not be reduced to the laws of physics and chemistry, and the
chemist Justus von Liebig (1803-1873), who treated vital force as "a property, which belongs
to a certain material body and becomes sensible when its elementary particles are combined
in a certain arrangement or form" (cited in Lowry, 1982, pp. 71-72).
As Johann F. Blumenbach (1752-1840) emphasized, vital force is postulated, like
gravitational force, based on observed effects. As long as there remain physiological
processes that cannot be explained reductively in terms of known physical and chemical
forces, it makes sense to postulate such a force.
This was the form of vitalism that Müller championed. However, his students would have
none of it. In 1842, Brücke and du Bois-Reymond reported on the solemn oath they had taken
with Ludwig and Helmholtz, stating that: "no other forces than the ordinary physical-
chemical forces are active in the organism" (du Bois-Reymond, 1842/1997, p. 19). They
founded the Berlin Physical Society in 1845, which was dedicated to the reductive
explanation of physiological processes. They all occupied leading chairs at German
universities.
Their commitment to reductive explanation was empirically validated by Ludwig's
explanation of urine formation, the first detailed explanation of a physiological process in
terms of well understood physical-chemical processes (Boakes, 1984). The daunting
complexity of most other physiological processes precluded the systematic reduction of the
physiological to the physical-chemical in the 19th century (Cranefield, 1957), but the
commitment of Müller's students to reductive explanation inspired them to make substantive
contributions to the study of neural transmission and reflective behavior.
Yet it would be wrong to assume that vitalism stifled the development of experimental
physiology. Müller and fellow vitalists such as Claude Bernard (1813-1878) and Louis
Pasteur (1822-1895) were gifted experimentalists who made substantive contributions to 19th
century physiology, just as dualists such as Flourens and Fritsch and Hitzig made significant
contributions to the neural localization of psychological capacities. However, Müller's
commitment to vitalism may partly explain the reluctance of many theorists to accept his
explanation of voluntary behavior, based on the spontaneous activity of the nervous system.

Emil du Bois-Reymond: Electrophysiology

In the 18th and 19th centuries, phenomena related to electricity became a popular topic of
discussion and interest. Starting with Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), whose experiments
with static electricity and lightning successfully popularized the subject of electricity in
Europe and America. Demonstrations of the human body's ability to be a conductor of
electricity became popular, including the medical treatment technique electrotherapy or
electric therapy became popular in the 19th century in the medical world. Luigi Galvani
(1737-1798) demonstrated the electrical nature of nerve activity when he produced
contractions in frog leg muscles that he connected to pieces of metal. However, Alessandro
Volta (1745-1827) disputed Galvani's results because the electrical activity recorded by
Galvani actually came from the interaction of the two pieces of metal attached to the frog's
leg muscles. So over time, more and more electrical activity testing tools were created to
examine a living tissue stimulated with electricity.
du Bois-Reymond succeeded in proving experimentally the basic electrical properties of
nerve transmission. The results of du Bois-Reymond's experiments show that the nervous
system does not produce electricity but instead acts as a conductor of electricity. However,
from these findings there is still a mystery how the nervous system can conduct electricity, as
it is known that an iron wire can only conduct electricity if it is insulated, but the nervous
system lacks insulation and wet tissue actually makes the electricity wasted. If you follow the
assumption that the nervous system has good insulation, then an electric current transmission
in an insulated conductor occurs very quickly (close to the speed of light), this is certainly as
fast as humans make decisions.