In Our Time: Vitalism

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the 18th- and 19th-century quest to understand what distinguished life from non-life and to unlock the secrets of creation. Vitalism is the idea that life could not be explained by materialist principles, that bodies carried some vital principle that distinguished living things from dull matter. When the Italian scientist Luigi Galvani made dead frogs twitch by applying electricity they thought they had found it. With Patricia Fara, Andrew Mendelsohn and Pietro Corsi.