Life Embodied: The Promise of Vital Force in Spanish Modernity by Nicolás Fernández-Medina (review)

Nicolás Fernández-Medina's ambitious tome breaks new ground as the first monograph to examine the history of vital force in Spain. It successfully demonstrates that theories of vital force —broadly defined as "the immanent energy that promotes the processes of life and growth in the body and in nature" (xiii)—have long been the subject of political controversy and unremitting fascination, while simultaneously holding the promise of resistance, critique, and innovation in the face of religious and state authority. There are four major tenets that lie at the core of this project: "the unstable category of the body, the anxiety over the nature of the soul, the complex epistemologies of resistance, and the necessity of reform" (xiv).

To be sure, Life Embodied is a capacious study that exhibits formidable historical breadth and interdisciplinary range, spanning three centuries and bridging history of science, philosophy, postmodern theory, and literature. As the author notes in the unconventionally substantive preface, "the subject of the book is vast" (xviii). It is perhaps for these reasons that the book will not appeal to all readers. A narrow readership will have the interdisciplinary training (the book presumes a baseline knowledge of history of science) and stamina for the book in its entirety, but numerous researchers will be drawn to select sections and chapters, each of which unveil neglected debates on the theories of vital force throughout Spanish modernity. Perhaps the most riveting and generative moments of the book are Fernández-Medina's literary evaluation of scientific ideas —exemplary of true interdisciplinarity—such as the ones that stem from Cabriada's letter and Mata y Fontanet's poetry.

Life Embodied is organized into three sections, each of which is comprised of two chapters. Part 1 "Blood, Circulation, and the Soul" opens with Juan de Cabriada's Carta filosófica, medico-chymica from 1687. While previous scholarship has focused on the critique it leverages against Spain's backwards scientific community, Cabriada's own contributions to medical theories have been neglected or outright negated. Fernández-Medina demonstrates that Cabriada contributes the most significant treatises of vital force of the late seventeenth century, one that moves away from Galenic humoralism and takes up new ideas from iatrochemistry and mechanic-vitalist discoveries from abroad. The remainder of Part 1 focuses on the circulation of Cartesianism in relation to theories of vital force, which generated great controversy and suspicion amongst traditionalists and clergy. Examining the critical writings of Marcelino Boix y Moliner's and Martín Martínez, Fernández-Medina concludes that Cartesianism significantly impacted medical evaluations of the body's vital force. Perhaps the most incisive intervention in this section is the novel reading of Torres Villaroel's Anatomía de todo lo visible, invisible de ambas esferas (1738), showing how it advanced the impossible project of pinpointing the anatomical origins of vital force, what Fernández-Medina calls "anatomizing the soul." (116). This impulse that begins with Villaroel extends into the Enlightenment period.

Part 2 "Political Reform and the Order of Nature" focuses on Spain's "medical revolution," unsettling commonplace assumptions about the state of medical science in the Bourbon Enlightenment. By this time, Spanish universities had finally dispelled Galenism and theories of vital forces drew from advances in microscopy, as well as new discoveries in anatomy, and the life-giving properties of blood. Here the book delves into the studies of Sebastián Miguel Guerrero Herreros who turned to fibrillar tissue as the origin of vital force, as well as Ignacio María Luzuriaga who remained convinced that vital force operated through oxygenated blood and the heart. Interestingly, this attention to the microscopic interior of the body in relation to vital force also led these doctors to conceptualize its macroscopic exterior, anticipating the organicist reason characteristic of Romantic science. Indeed, Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos, as Medina-Fernández goes on to show, figures...