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Hello, on a dreary night in November 18 a young doctor called

Frankenstein completed an experiment and described it in his diary. I collected the

instruments of life around me that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet.

By the glimmer of the half-extinguished light I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open.

Frankenstein may seem an Atlantic tale,

but Mary Shelley wrote it when signs was alive with ideas

about what differentiated the living from the dead. This was vitalism, a belief that living creatures

possessed some spark of life, some vital principle, which is not to be explained mechanistically,

not a product solely of chemistry or physics.

Descartes had proposed its opposite, materialism in the 17th century and set up a great debate

in which electricity played an important part. With me to discuss vitalism I Andrew Mendelssohn. on Professor of the History of Science of the University of Oxford and

Prodisha Farah, Senior Tutor at Clare College, Cambridge University.

Trishafarra, it's a huge subject but let's start with the discovery of a fish

in South America called a torpedo fish. Can you explain

why that amazed the people at the time and what significance it had?

Well the torpedo fish is called that because it induces a sort of torpor in your body and there'd been rumors ever since the times of the Greeks that there

were some giant creatures that lived in the oceans that could give you a colossal shot rather like the

the Ramora that was meant to hang on to the side of ships and drag them down

into the bottom of the ocean and during the 18th century because there were more

international voyages people started

...