This book offers an important account of the relationship between science and culture in the eighteenth century. It examines the 'vitalist' turn in physiology and natural philosophy, and its presence and effect in the burgeoning of philosophical and scientific inquiry of the Scottish Enlightenment, and the radical politics and culture of the 1790s.
Acknowledgements Introduction: Eighteenth Century Vitalism Forms of Enlightenment: Embodied Beings in Eighteenth-Century Scotland Generating Sympathy: Sensibility, Animation, and Vitality in Adam Smith and Mary Wollstonecraft Labouring Bodies in Political Economy: Labour, Vitalist Physiology and the Body Politic Enlightenment Legacies and Cultural Radicalism: Physiology and Politics in the 1790s Animated Nature: Erasmus Darwin and the Poetry and Politics of Vital Matter, 1789-1803 Animation and Vitality in Women's Writing of the 1790s Conclusion: Eighteenth-century Vitalism, Romantic Organicism, Literature and the Disciplines Bibliography Index
