This article explores the merging of physiological and philosophical strains of vitalist thought in the Anniversary Sermons celebrating the work of the British Humane Society, an organization devoted to promoting resuscitation techniques in the late eighteenth century. Residing at the intersection of literature, medicine, and religion, Humane Society sermons delivered by William Dodd and other prominent clergymen reflect the transnational identifications lurking at the origins of the Society. This paper argues that the Sermons also reveal the Society's concern with articulating an idea of Britishness primarily through its intervention in attempts at suicide that helped define a notion of the English Malady in the period. In this sense, the Sermons reveal how the transnational, far from challenging an emergent idea of the nation, may instead have given rise to an imagining of national identity fostered by a devotional—rather than a wholly secularized—print culture.