“Life and Death Appeared to Me Ideal Bounds”: Investigations into Life, Death, Resuscitation, and “Vegetable Poisons” in Early Nineteenth-Century Britain

Abstract

This chapter discusses the period of the British Romantic, in which concepts like reanimation and resuscitation gain importance in life science, as well as in popular discourses. The increasing interest in physiological experiments that aim at reanimating apparently dead organisms raise growing doubts about the life-death dichotomy, suggesting the possibility of reversible states between them. This chapter considers such general questions within an intercultural dialog between science, medicine, and literature. More specifically, it presents some toxicological experiments by the physician B. C. Brodie that exemplify how experimental practice and the manipulation of vital processes contributed to the dissolution of the traditional borders between “living” and “dead” bodies. This conceptual ambiguity is furtherly enhanced by the scientific and literary reflection on poisons as enigmatic and precarious substances, carriers of both life and death.