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Making the Physical Real
in the Psychical: How
Intoxicants Intervened in
the Formation of the
Biological Subject in the
Nineteenth Century

Matthew Perkins-McVey
Dalhousie University

This paper explores the formative role of substances of intoxication in the social
and scientiﬁc establishment of the biological subject in late nineteenth-century
Germany. Sourcing the emergence of substances of intoxication as “vital sub-
stances” from Brunonianism, this narrative traces their initial signiﬁcance for
Romantic physiology, followed by their rejection from neo-mechanical scientiﬁc
physiology. Emphasis is placed on late nineteenth-century psychological
research on the effects of intoxicants on the mind as the site of a dynamic
encounter between theories of the mind and the body, particularly through
Kraepelin’s concept of intoxication as model psychosis, and his related research.
The biological subject, here, is anti-vitalistic, and, yet, conceptually distinct
from neo-mechanism.

One evening in the winter of 1877/1878, Emil Kraepelin, then still a
junior psychiatric assistant, was anxiously preparing for his looming state
exam, a task which saw him working long nights on sphygmographic
studies (Kraepelin 1983).1 Somewhere between mounting stress and the
long hours, Kraepelin’s waking and sleeping lives were quickly blending
together. But Kraepelin had a solution. He promptly injected himself with
0.02 grains of morphine, about 20 mg., hoping to wake up refreshed the

1. The source text, Kraepelin’s Lebenserinnerungen, provides an outlook on some aspects
of Kraepelin’s life which diverges in some cases from the reckoning of events established by
modern Kraepelin scholarship, particularly that of Engstrom and Steinberg. Nevertheless,
Kraepelin’s memoir is an invaluable source of insight into the “quieter” events in Kraepelin’s
biography.

Perspectives on Science 2023, vol. 31, no. 3
© 2023 by The Massachusetts Institute of Technology

https://doi.org/10.1162/posc_a_00575

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following morning (Kraepelin 1983). Kraepelin never got the night’s sleep
he so desired. He took too high a dose and spent the entire night awake,
nauseous and vomiting, before being rewarded the next morning with the
ﬁrst of many future migraines (Kraepelin 1983). By his own account, this
was to his fortune; the experience may have spared him an eventual reliance
that he had already seen afﬂict some of his fellow students (Kraepelin 1983).
Nevertheless, this experience as a junior researcher may have changed the
course of his life. Starting with his post-doctoral work in Wilhelm Wundt’s
Leipzig laboratory, research into the effects of intoxication on all kinds of
mental states would become a virulent force in Kraepelin’s experimental
research for the better part of twenty years.

This is but one of the more banal vignettes in a much greater, over-
looked tale in the history of the biological subject. The body as it has come
to be understood in “the West,” with both mind and body understood as a
single, ﬂeshy entity—as “biological”—is a relatively recent occurrence. As
we have it, the story of the body, and especially the human body, comes to
a head in the nineteenth century, when mechanists and vitalists became
locked in a protracted struggle over the ultimate nature of organic matter.
Darwinism is popularly credited with the ﬁnality of the shift away from
vitalism, as well as mechanism, in the broader conception of not only the
body but also the experience of embodiment. But what if this was only a
fraction of the puzzle? Darwinism was, after all, initially a model of mor-
phological shift, the bread and butter of German Romantic physiology.
Further still, Darwin’s framework provides no explicit or implicit critique
of vitalism (or mechanism).

How did the body cease to be either (as La Mettrie put it) “a machine
that winds its own springs” or a viviﬁed entity, radically divorced from the
inorganic world of salts and minerals, and instead become something of a
marriage of both? (1748, p. 34)2 After all, the biologistic conception of the
subject clearly entails so much more than mere bio-genetic reductionism,
as some continue to suggest (Lewontin 2003). Wherever it goes, the bio-
logical subject is supported by a sprawling baggage train of decidedly
non-mechanistic actors—a mobile army variously comprised of treatment
modalities, theories of mind, and newfound psycho-bodily forces, such as
stress. If the biological subject refers to a subjectivity whose self-concept is
to be understood in strictly physical terms, it appears to fundamentally
differ from the kind of physio-chemical entity imagined by nineteenth-
century neo-mechanism. What is the nature of this shift, and how did this
idea take hold so quickly in the late nineteenth century? The answer, I
propose, is intoxication, drunkenness, and inebriation. In a hazy dance that

2. […] “une machine qui monte elle-même ses resorts.”

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Intoxicants in the Formation of the 19th Century Biological Subject

spans the 18th and nineteenth centuries, I argue that it is the scientiﬁc
encounter with substances of intoxication and their effects on the body
(and mind) that ultimately gave rise to the biological subject toward the
end of the nineteenth century.

Here I will be outlining the major developments in the history of this
process. Starting with the development of late eighteenth-century scien-
tiﬁc medicine out of experimentalist pharmacy, I establish the inﬂuence
of John Brown’s theory of excitability on early nineteenth-century Ger-
many and the associated “vital substance concept.” Thereafter, I situate
the impact of this concept in the context of the debates between vitalists
and neo-mechanists, understanding it as a conﬂict which severs the phys-
iological conception of the body from the experience of embodiment.
Finally, I demonstrate how late nineteenth-century research on the effects
of intoxicants on the mind, led by Emil Kraepelin, ultimately form the
bridge between the physiological body and the psychical experience of
embodiment.

1. Vital Substances
Intoxicants began to serve a more prominent role in medical theory follow-
ing the emergence of the ofﬁcial European pharmacopoeias over the course
of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as the growing interest in
experimentalism brought many of the compound remedies of the materia
medica under scrutiny.3 By the time that Newtonian aspirations had taken
root in the practical art of medicine, these established experimental prac-
tices in pharmacy would help structure some the varied eighteenth-century
attempts at systematizing medicine. Of all the would-be founders of New-
tonian medicine, the emphasis on pharmacy would be greater for none
other than John Brown. The Brownian, or Brunonian, system of medicine,
published in 1780, copied the model proposed by his teacher William
Cullen, but with several important changes (Brown 1788).4 The principle
innovation of Brown’s was the suggestion that the level of vital force,
called “excitability,” could be quantiﬁed by tracking and attributing
weighted scores to a patient’s activities and inputs (Brown 1788). Since
vital force could not be quantiﬁed in vivo, it would be calculated as the

3. Other recent, and signiﬁcant, pieces of scholarship in the history of pharmacy have
considered developments outside of the central-European context. These are important dis-
cussions. The history of pharmacy is not exclusively, or even centrally, European; however,
this narrative primarily focuses on the developments in the setting of central Europe.

4. The initial treatise was written in Latin and was later translated to English. Here I

rely on the 1788 translation.

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sum of scored bodily functions, and compared with a pre-established grad-
ing chart (Brown 1788). A continuum from 0–80 degrees, the chart’s
median value of 40 represented a state of perfect health, while those
exceeding 40 where “sthenic,” having too much excitability, and those
below 40 were “asthenic” (Brown 1788). By Brown’s report, in over ninety
percent of cases the patient was asthenic, and thus in need of some form of
vital stimulus (Brown 1788). Medicine then was about facilitating the
depletion or increase in a patient’s excitability and, for Brown, there were
no more powerfully curative vital stimulants than opium and spiritous
drink. Brown’s claims regarding the efﬁcacy of these remedies, as well
as the idea for the entire medical system, were derived from his own expe-
riences curing his gout with opium (Brown 1788). Intoxicants saved
lives—stimulating the waning ﬂesh of the sick and weary. They were,
in effect, what I have dubbed “vital substances:” materials with a uniquely
potent excitatory or vitalizing effect.

The Brunonian system never gained much of any popularity in Brown’s
native Britain, with the notable exceptions of Humphrey Davy, Coleridge,
and De Quincey (Bergman 1991; Cooke 1974; Gao 2020; Golinski 2011;
Morrison 1997).5 However, it did attain a fantastic degree of popularity
among the Germans. There, too, great efforts had been made to realize a
systematic medicine, a scientiﬁc medicine, though Kant’s restrictive deﬁ-
nition of a proper science posed a lofty barrier. Bavarian physician Andreas
Röschlaub saw Brown’s system as satisfying Kant’s criteria and put for-
ward his own interpretation of Brunonianism in 1798, which he called
Erregbarkeitstheorie (Röschlaub 1798; Tsouyopolous 1982). Brown’s system,
Röschlaub proposed, at least theoretically allowed for the quantiﬁcation of
health metrics and, though Brown’s model was initially encountered with
some hesitance in Germany, Röschlaub made it palatable by bringing the
concept of Brownian excitability into accordance with Fichte’s Wissenschaft-
slehre (Röschlaub 1799; Tsouyopolous 1988).6 At the peak of its popular-
ity, the Brunonian system, and with it the “vital substance concept” found
supporters among physicians like Hufeland and Brühl-Cramer, chemists
such as Johann Ritter, philosophers such as Immanuel Kant and Schelling,
and, ﬁnally, naturphilosophical physiologists such as Lorenz Oken and

5. Davy even categorized his new discovery of nitrous oxide as a Brunonian stimulus.

Notably, those listed here became interested in Brown via German sources.

6. Nelly Tsouyopolous (1988) argues that the success of Erregbarkeitstheorie can be
attributed to a foundational conceptual similarity between Brown’s system and Fichte’s
philosophy. Given that Schelling initially opposed Brownianism as too mechanistic, only
to become a devout follower of Röschlaub, it would seem the determinative factor was
Röschluab’s interpretation of Brown along the lines of Romantic philosophy.

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Intoxicants in the Formation of the 19th Century Biological Subject

Schönlein (Brühl-Cramer 1819; Kielhorn 1996; Schelling [1799] 1858: 3;
Schelling 1799; Tsouyopolous 1988).7 Evidence of the vital substance con-
cept can even be found in Friedrich Sertürner’s discovery of not only mor-
phine, but the entire class of alkaloids as a type of thing to be in the world
(Sertürner 1817).8

An enduring testament to the sheer depth of Brunonianism’s short-
lived inﬂuence can be seen in the central place accorded to it in Schelling’s
and Oken’s Naturphilosophie. They expanded upon Röschlaub’s framework
by integrating excitability into theories of organic activity, such as galva-
nism, further interpolating Brunonian ideas into the fundamental struc-
tures of the living cosmos. In his 1799 Erster Entwurf eines Systems der
Naturphilosophie, Schelling positioned himself alongside Röschlaub and
Brown in proposing that excitability was the ﬁrst property of organic life
(Schelling [1799] 1858: 3, p. 144). Excitability here referred to the under-
lying duality of the organic as both a subject, which constantly determines
itself through activity, and as an object, something acted upon and main-
tained through external interaction (Schelling 1799). In this sense, excit-
ability was simultaneously a description of the general activity of living
beings, and of the experience of being a bodily subject (Schelling 1858).
Other theories of bodily activity were of considerable importance to
Naturphilosophie as well. The signiﬁcance of galvanism and animal magne-
tism, or mesmerism, are particularly well-known (Gantet 2021; Montiel
2009; Schelling 1858). For Schelling and his followers, galvanism and
mesmerism were demonstrations of the fundamental symmetry of Being,
each mirroring the inorganic phenomena of electricity and magnetism,
respectively. Further still, the dialectical interplay between mesmerist
and somnambulist was a realization of the unity between self and world,
an image of vital action itself (Montiel 2009).9

7. Hufeland initially rejected the Brunonian system outright, in favor of his own holis-
tic model; however, he eventually “wrote several articles about John Brown, in 1819, 1822,
and 1829, and compared Brown with Galen” (Tsouyopolous 1988, p. 66). Hufeland also
wrote the foreword for C. von Brühl-Cramer’s Brunonian study on the phenomenon of
Trunksucht (a proto-concept of alcoholism), calling the new illness Dipsomania (Brühl-
Cramer 1819).

8. Sertürner would later openly identify with Naturphilosophie, but there is a strong case
for Romantic inﬂuences earlier in his youth. Sertürner’s 1805 “Säure im Opium” drew
heavily upon Christoph Buchholz’s “Versuche die Zerlegung des Opiums,” and C. Buchholz
was a Romantic chemist after the style of Wilhelm Buchholz, his uncle and Goethe’s advisor
(Maehle 1999; Partington 1962; Sertürner 1805). When ﬁrst experimenting with his opium
isolate, Sertürner describes the effects as stimulating the body (Sertürner 1817).

9. Gantet (2021) attributes Schelling’s sudden interest in animal magnetism to the

inﬂuence of his younger brother, Karl Eberhard Schelling.

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Nevertheless, excitability, vital substances, and intoxication were
evidently of, at the very least, comparable signiﬁcance for early Naturphi-
losophen, as reﬂected in Schelling’s use of opium’s effect on the body as a
principal example of bodily causation:

That opium has an exciting effect is explained by its chemical, or,
what is the same, its electrical nature (that is why it also works in
galvanism), but its indirect effect, that is, the effect mediated by the
activity of the organism itself, is narcotic, and this effect is of course
chemically unexplained: because it is indirect. Thus, on the whole it
is shown that the very same materials which cause the most violent
excitability (which must be explained from their chemical and
electrical properties) indirectly exhaust excitability (which, of course,
can no longer be explained from their chemical properties). It’s no
wonder chemical explanations go no further than this. The ultimate
effect of external causes on the organism can no longer be explained
chemically. (Schelling 1858, p. 83)10

Opium’s stimulatory capabilities are an entailment of opium’s galvanic,
and chemical properties, but opium’s predominate effect, that of narcosis,
reflects the more fundamental nature of excitability. Narcosis is neither
chemical nor galvanic, but rather the perceptional expression of the bodily
mediation of excess stimulation, the very occasion of an interface between
individuated organism and nature. Excitability, in this sense, refers to the
ongoing synthesis behind this duplicitous character of being a subject, of
being both an actor and something acted-upon. As Schelling himself
suggests, the “entire secret rests upon the on the opposition between inner
and outer, which must be conceded if one concedes to anything individual
in nature overall” (Schelling 1799, p. 84).11 While it might at ﬁrst appear
that Schelling could just as easily replace the example of opium with food,
sleep—nearly any activity—Schelling elected to use the example of opium

10. “Daß das Opium erregend wirkt, ist erklärt aus seiner chemischen, oder, was das-
selbe ist, seiner elektrischen Beschaffenheit (darum wirkt es auch im Galvanismus) – aber
seine mittelbare, d.h. durch die Thätigkeit des Organismus selbst vermittelte Wirkung ist
narkotisch, und diese Wirkung ist freilich chemisch unerklärt: denn sie ist indirekt. So
zeigt sich im Ganzen, daß eben dieselben Materien, welche die heftigste Erregbarkeit
verursachen (was aus ihrer chemischen und elektrischen Beschaffenheit erklärt werden
muß), indirekt die Erregbarkeit erschöpfen (was nun freilich nicht mehr aus ihrer
chemischen Beschaffenheit erklärbar ist). Es ist kein Wunder, daß es mit den chemischen
Erklärungen nicht fort will. Die letzte Wirkung der äußeren Ursachen auf den Organismus
kann nicht mehr chemisch erklärt warden.”

11. […] “das ganze Geheimnis beruht auf jenem Gegensatz zwischen Innerem und
Aeußerem, den man zugeben muß, wenn man in der Natur überhaupt etwas Individuelles
zugibt.”

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366

Intoxicants in the Formation of the 19th Century Biological Subject

because he, like Brown, understood it as being among those “materials
which cause the most violent excitability” (Schelling 1799, p. 83).12
Opium’s divergent effects are taken up in describing the ways in which
the forces of life, among them galvanism and animal magnetism, partici-
pate with, and even unfold from, the Röschlaubian principle of excitabil-
ity, as the ﬁrst principle of the organism.13 Even Lorenz Oken, for whom
“galvanism is the principle of life [and] there is no other life force than
galvanic polarity,” “excitability is the most general phenomenon of organic
matter, and it belongs to plants and animals” (Oken 1810, pp. 10,
134).14,15 As for Schelling, Oken understood narcotics to have profound
effects on account of their role as stimulants of excitability, and subse-
quently the galvanic process (Oken 1843).

The success of the vital substance concept among German Romantic
thinkers can at least in part be accounted for by the relationship between
intoxication and the experience of embodiment. John Brown claimed to
have based his medical system on his own experiences taking opium, while
the crux of Sertürner’s identiﬁcation of morphine as opium’s somniferic
principle relied on self-experimentation (Brown 1788; Sertürner 1817).
In each case, intoxication imparted some form of knowledge by viscerally
interceding in one’s lived experience of being in a body, which naturally
appealed to the Romantic’s intuitive philosophical conceptions, much like
galvanism and mesmerism. While the last signiﬁcant interest in mesmer-
ism waned with the decline of German Romanticism, galvanism and the
vital substance concept shared a different fate.

2. Neo-Mechanism in Revolt
Attributions of vitalistic properties to a wide array of intoxicating sub-
stances could still be found into the 1840s, notably in Johannes Müller’s
famous Handbuch der Physiologie des Menschens. Even as he disparaged the
ideas of the Brunonians, Müller proposed that experimental evidence dem-
onstrated that opium and alcohol stimulated nervous tissue at low doses
(Müller 1834). At higher doses, Müller found that opium and alcohol
altered, and thereby destroyed, nervous tissue, seemingly through a process
of over-excitation—an idea which seemingly stemmed directly from the
Okenian suggestion that narcotic poisoning functioned through

12. […] “Materien, welche die heftigste Erregbarkeit verursachen.”
13. The infamous case of Auguste Böhme further exempliﬁes the extent of Schelling’s

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personal belief in Brunonianism on not only a theoretical, but on a practical level.

14. “[d]er Galvanismus ist das Princip des Lebens [and] es gibt keine andre Leben-

skraft, als die galvanische Polarität.”

kommt Pﬂanzen und Tieren zu.”

15. […] “die Erregbarkeit ist das allgemeinste Phänomen der organischen Masse, und

Perspectives on Science

367

over-polarization of the nervous system’s galvanic polarity (Oken 1810,
1843). Müller himself was a vitalist, and his reception of the vital sub-
stance concept reﬂected both his belief in the physiological fact of vitalism
and his aspirations of debriding the science of physiology of speculative
conﬂations (Müller 1834). With a great debt to Alexander and Wilhelm
Humboldt, Müller succeeded at turning the University of Berlin into the
center of a research program focused on systematizing physiology, reform-
ing physiology into a rigorous and experimentally focused science (Finger
et al. 2013; Fullinwider 1991; Rothschuh 1973; Zimmer 2006). Müller’s
students, meanwhile, were in revolt. In the period from 1842 to 1847,
Hermann Helmholtz, Ernst Brücke, Carl Ludwig, and Emil du Bois-
Reymond each committed themselves wholly to the eradication of the the-
ory of vitalism and a conclusive realization of physio-chemical processes as
the foundation of all life, signing an oath, legend would have it, in their
own blood (Cahan 1993; Fullinwider 1991; Greenwood 2015).16 They
were at the forefront of a neo-mechanist revolution. This meant wresting
the sciences of the body from everything to do with vitalism, especially the
vital substance concept.

To this end, du Bois-Reymond quickly laid siege to the inﬂuence of
Brunonian vital stimulants in the experiments of Johann Ritter, Matteucci,
and Giovanni Aldini (Du Bois-Reymond 1848, p. 98).17 Primarily inter-
ested with electrophysiology, it is to be expected that du Bois-Reymond’s
Untersuchung über thierische Elekticität would address earlier claims made by
galvanists about the nature of animal electricity. Yet, the number of refer-
ences to Ritter greatly exceed those of nearly any researcher, with the nota-
ble exceptions of Volta and Matteucci (Du Bois-Reymond 1848). While
admiring Ritter’s tenacity, du Bois-Reymond freely opined about Ritter’s
erroneous attempts to understand electrophysical phenomena “according to
the murky Brunonian categories of depression and excitation,” seeing them
as “modiﬁcations of the no less murky principle of excitability [or

16. There is a degree of debate concerning the veracity of the legend that they made a
literal blood oath. Greenwood suggests that only the initial, 1842 pledge consisting of du
Bois-Reymond, Ludwig, and Brücke was sealed in blood. In any case, the legend of an anti-
vitalist blood oath effectively reﬂects the depths of their conviction, even if the blood oath
itself is a ﬁction.

17. Du Bois-Reymond’s refutations of Ritter are an interesting case. As a Naturphilo-
soph, Ritter’s theoretical position was that galvanic and electrical currents fundamentally
emerge from the same underlying principle. All of nature is an unfolding of an original
unity, and Ritter even questioned whether heterogeneity (polarity) alone, in any context,
was sufﬁcient to develop a charge. Nevertheless, Ritter’s experimental methods were not
only Romantic, but inﬂuenced by Brunonian ideas, and so they had little place in the new
science.

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irritability]” (Du Bois-Reymond 1848, p. 367).18 Concerning Aldini’s
ﬁndings that the introduction of a Brownian stimulant, such as an
opium-alcohol solution, into the layers of the frog pile increased excitation,
du Bois-Reymond disregarded them as deserving of little attention (Du
Bois-Reymond 1848, p. 98). Skepticism concerning the role of vital
stimulants even featured in du Bois-Reymond’s raucous critiques of Carlo
Matteucci’s research on the galvanic frog pile, contradicting Matteucci’s
ﬁndings that there was a measurable difference in excitation when the
galvanic pile employed opium-poisoned frogs (Du Bois-Reymond 1849,
p. 171).

In each case, du Bois-Reymond made a concerted effort to undermine
the validity of any remaining vestiges of Brunonian thinking. Even when
Brunonian ideas is seemingly absent, nothing more than the mere sugges-
tion of involving intoxicants in the experimental process, du Bois-
Reymond nevertheless appears to have been committed to barring such
impulses from the new science of physiology. It is as if the use of intoxi-
cants in research, vital substances, and Brunonianism had become so
inextricably linked that to permit the inﬂuence of anyone would be con-
trary to their mission of divesting physiology of vitalism. This perspective
was indirectly supported by du Bois-Reymond, Helmholtz, and Brücke
shared understanding that—unlike the speculative sciences of the Roman-
tics, rich in metaphor and symbolic inference—physiology should hence-
forth be limited to the experimental study of the physio-chemical nature of
life (Fullinwider 1991). Not only were vital substances conceptually
excluded from their physio-chemical science, the experiential empiricism
that initially gave rise to Brunonian theory was excluded on the basis of
shifting criteria of epistemic validity.19 Ironically, it had been precisely the
non-scientiﬁc nature of late eighteenth-century medicine that had made
possible the Brunonian system, even as Brown himself sought to imbue
scientiﬁc systematicity upon the art of medicine. Now, developing notions
of scientiﬁcity had all but eradicated the last vestiges of the Brunonian
legacy in the life sciences.

Unsurprisingly, many coming from this new generation of physiolo-
gists, for the most part students of Helmholtz, Du Bois-Reymond, and
Brücke, did not seem particularly preoccupied with studying the effects

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18. “nach den dunklen Brown’schen Kategorieen von Depression und Exaltation vor

sich gehende Modiﬁcationen der nicht minder dunklen Qualität Irritabilität.”

19. Ironically, it had been precisely the non-scientiﬁc nature of late eighteenth-century
medicine that had made possible the Brunonian system, even as Brown himself sought to
imbue scientiﬁc systematicity upon the art of medicine.

Perspectives on Science

369

of intoxicants. The case could be made that this was because studying
states of intoxication were secondary to more fundamental physiological
questions, such as the speed of an action potential, or the nature of nerve
conduction. When substances of intoxicating are the subject of inquiry it
is primarily relegated to the effect on a certain bodily function. It would
appear that the emerging physio-chemical encounter with the body
entailed a forgetting of the experience of the body. That is, the experience
of embodiment, a notion so crucial to vitalistic thinking, and the intoxicated
encounters that characterized the early nineteenth century. To this point, it
is worth asking how the modern biological subject could emerge out of a
neo-mechanistic conception of the body which did not also include the
psychical experience of embodiment? The answer is simply that it did not.

Cortical Maps of an Interior World

3.
By almost any measure, the neo-mechanist research program was incredi-
bly productive, both at advancing novel, experimental observations about
the body, and at embedding itself in a social and institutional milieu. Du
Bois-Reymond’s public disputes with Matteucci and other galvanists suc-
cessfully vanquished much of the galvanic thinking carried forward from
the nineteenth century, work almost immediately followed by Helmholtz’s
successful measurement of the speed of an action potential as it moved
along the sciatic nerve (Finkelstein 2013; Glynn 2013; Helmholtz
1850). Yet, for all their swiftly gained achievements, the nature of think-
ing, of feeling—of the mind—remained something presumed, rather than
something empirically demonstrated. Extending the neo-mechanistic
model into the mind, Theodor Meynert, Brücke’s student, developed his
concept of cytoarchitecture into a full-ﬂedged system intent on establish-
ing a correlation between neurophysiological features and mental states, to
map an interior world.

In the 1870’s, Meynert was brieﬂy held by some to be “the greatest
brain-anatomist of his time,” both for his prediction of cortical localiza-
tion, as well as his pioneering efforts to develop a uniﬁed science of the
mind grounded in brain science (Dalzell 2011, p. 68). But he was ulti-
mately derided as something of a quack by the mid-1880’s (Hakosalo
2006).20 A similar fate would align with Meynert’s enthusiastic student

20. The high point of Meynert’s career is arguably the period from 1870–1876 follow-
ing Hitzig and Fritsch’s 1870 identiﬁcation of the motor cortex in a dog, which was under-
stood to be an experimental demonstration of Meynert’s 1867 proposal that the theory of
cortical inexcitability was incorrect (Fritsch and Hitzig 1870). Hitzig and Fritsch remarked
that Meynert was perhaps the only person who, on an anatomical basis, predicted their
experimental ﬁndings (Fritsch and Hitzig 1870, p. 307).

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and closest ally, Carl Wernicke, whose own efforts to understand the mind
physio-chemically were eventually perceived as equally dubious, particu-
larly by a young Freud, despite Wernicke’s important work on aphasia
(Freud 1891; Marx 1970). The deterioration of Meynert’s authority, and,
by association, Wernicke’s, from its highest point in the early 1870’s was
at least partially a product of methodological changes implemented by
fellow physiologically-minded psychiatrists. Hakosalo makes a strong case
that Meynert’s disinterest in adapting his method of cross-sectioning the
brain to Bernhard Gudden’s 1875 method of hardening brain tissue, such
that it could be sliced with a microtome, quickly left him at odds with the
neurophysiological community (Hakosalo 2006). These latent tensions
came to a head in a January 1878 meeting of the Medico-Psychological
Society of Berlin, where Emmanuel Mendel gave a presentation concerning
“whether the auditory pathway was related to the superior cerebellar
peduncle or not” (Hakosalo 2006, p. 188). Wernicke was in attendance.
Using Gudden’s cross-sectioning method, Mendel demonstrated that the
two structures were related by way of the dentate nucleus, a contradiction
of Meynert’s own ﬁndings (Hakosalo 2006). Wernicke spoke up, attempt-
ing to undermine the validity of this new method, to little effect.

With this in mind, it is clear that Meynert and Wernicke’s haste to
equate mental and neural states was not singularly at fault in their decline.
Other brain psychiatrists, among them Gudden, Mendel, and Flechsig,
were considerably more hesitant to make sweeping conceptual claims
about the ultimate nature of mental life, especially in its most complex
expressions. Meynert continued on in his work, publishing the ambitious
Ueber die Gefühle in 1882. Yet, by this stage, Meynert’s reputation, and the
research program it represented, had fallen sharply from the stature it once
commanded. “The psychiatric concepts of Meynert, even of some of his
anatomy, were subsequently rejected by both the German and French
schools of psychiatry,” and, by the mid-1880’s, Meynert faced broad crit-
icisms that “his functional claims lacked factual support” (Triarhou 2021,
p. 55). Prior to his death in 1891, “malicious tongues claimed that
Meynert’s only connection with psychiatry was that he had gone through
delirium tremens” (Shorter 1997, p. 97).21 In this sense, any meaningful

21. This is not to suggest Meynert’s work was without merit. Triarhou points out that
Meynert primarily expanded on earlier anatomical ﬁndings using his histological expertise,
and Seitelberger credits Meynert with the pioneering development of a uniﬁed brain-
science (Seitelberger 1997; Triarhou 2021). Ultimately, the life sciences have aligned them-
selves with Meynert’s general vision of an interdisciplinary science of the brain, which
informs psychiatric practice.

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Perspectives on Science

371

endeavor at a totalizing, physiologically reductive conception of the mind
had been decisively routed, if only for a time.22

However, the development of the neo-mechanical research program out
of the Berlin physiological school was from singularly representative of the
models of mental life available in mid- to late-nineteenth-century Ger-
many. In 1839, Gustav Fechner suffered a terrible accident while studying
afterimages. Temporarily blinded, Fechner stepped down from his position
as professor of physics and later sought to develop a method for systema-
tically studying mental phenomena (Boring 1950; Heidelberger 2004). Of
especial importance for Fechner was that psychic phenomena be measur-
able, something made possible with the advent of what he termed Weber’s
law: Ernst Weber’s and Fechner’s observation that the intensity of the per-
ceived stimulus (S) of a sensation is the logarithm of the physical input (P)
multiplied by a constant (K), or S = k log P (Fechner [1860] 1888, p. 17;
Fancher and Rutherford 2016). Unlike Weber, who understood physiology
in neo-mechanical terms, Fechner upheld the existence of a parallelistic
duality of body and mind—the physical and the psycho-spiritual (psychi-
cal). Fechner’s colleague, Wilhelm Wundt, took this a step further and in
1879 founded the ﬁrst laboratory dedicated to the experimental encounter
with psychological phenomena (Domanski 2004).23 Although Wundt’s
foundational Grundzüge de physiologischen Psychologie dedicates a considerable
portion of the text to topics such as the physiological mechanics of nervous
function, Wundt argued that psychology merited recognition as a distinct
scientiﬁc discipline because psychical phenomena fell outside of the

22. This is not to say that Gudden, Flechsig, etc. did not assume that mental states
could be reduced to mental states, but rather that this functioned as an antecedent condi-
tion, which guided research, while Meynert had actually aspired to realize the idea, and
reconceive of psychiatry, thereby.

23. There is considerable scholarly debate about the origins of Wundt’s own paralle-
listic conception of the physical and the psychical. Fahrenberg and Klempe propose the
Leibniz was an important inﬂuence on Wundt (Fahrenberg 2016; Klempe 2021) Signiﬁ-
cant inﬂuence on Wundt’s ideas have even been attributed to John Stuart Mill (Boring
1950; Bistricky 2013). Though, as Araujo points out, the majority of Wundt’s references
to Mill’s Logic are critical, and Wundt’s own attributions of inﬂuence to Leibniz are incon-
sistent (Araujo 2016, p. 65). I propose that Fechner’s direct inﬂuence can be seen in the
incremental development of Wundt’s Beiträge zur Theorie der Sinneswahrnehmung. In the por-
tions written prior to 1860, there is little evidence, if any, to suggest that Wundt upheld a
parallelistic understanding of the mind. Yet from 1860 onward, Wundt’s Beiträge not only
begin to make reference to Fechner, but the 1862 foreword states “dass [Fechner’s law] in
der That nicht ein physisches Gesetz ist,” meaning “dass dasselbe Gesetz auch im Gebiet
der höheren psychischen Thätigkeiten seine Gültigkeit behält” [“that [Fechner’s law] is in
fact not a physical law,” meaning “that the same law retains its validity also in the ﬁeld of
higher psychic activities.”] ( Wundt 1862, p. xxx).

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Intoxicants in the Formation of the 19th Century Biological Subject

purview of physiology (Wundt 1874). Wundt further sought to overcome
the failed neo-mechanical correlation between mental states and brain
states in asserting a doctrine of psychological parallelism which denied
the possibility of identiﬁcation of the mind with cortical processes.24
The psychical, not merely the psycho-physical, could be experimentally
encountered, and, eventually, understood.

Simultaneously, Wundt maintained that the conscious process should
not be understood as metaphysical or spiritual, as Fechner had, but rather
as a psychical principle, in every sense emergent of a body shaped by
physio-chemical processes (Engstrom 2015; Meischner-Metge 2010;
Wundt 1874). Thus, if the “Berlin school” is to be understood as the great
center of a pioneering conception of the subject grounded almost exclu-
sively in “the body,” the “Leipzig school” might rightly be considered
the locus of an encounter with subjectivity concerned fundamentally with
“embodiment,” the study of the nature of conscious mental experience as
mental experience. Wundtian psychology, after all, can be described as
nothing less than the scientiﬁc study of the human experience of embodi-
ment, denoting the summation of the dynamic, perceptional interaction
with the lifeworld.

This raises an important point with respect to the modern conception of
biologism. In the context of the nineteenth century, it was clear to those
attempting to apply principles of neurophysiology, especially cortical local-
ization, to mental states that a neo-mechanist model needed to be able to
account for mental and emotional phenomena. As just discussed, it was the
difﬁculty at doing so that created a space for Wundtian psychology. The
result was, in a sense, a recapitulation of Fechnerian, or Leibnizian, mind-
body dualism. This was a problem. Biologism could only mean uniting the
entirety of self and world, embodiment and the body, within a dynamic
material principle.

Intoxicated Psychology

4.
This ﬁnally circles back to Kraepelin’s 1877 late-night experience with
morphine. Four years later (in 1881), Kraepelin wrote to Wundt to pro-
pose a topic for his post-doctoral project. Kraepelin wanted to research the
effects of Nervina, like morphine, cocaine, amyl nitrate, tea, alcohol, and
hashish, on reaction time (Kraepelin 1881). The premise was that, in
studying the effects of different intoxicants on the mind, the rudimentary
structures of the human psyche, and—with it—the ultimate nature of

24. Wundt had initially attempted to establish a career in physiology, studying under

du Bois-Reymond, and working as Helmholtz’s assistant in Heidelberg.

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mental illness, could be brought to light (Kraepelin 1883a, 1883b). The
proposed subject matter was timely. The German patent medicine had
bloomed over the preceding decade, unfettered in 1871 by changes in
the once-restrictive law concerning the manufacture of medicines (Woycke
1992, p. 44). One brand, F. A. Richter, earned in excess of ﬁve million
marks annually by the 1880’s (Woycke 1992, p. 44). Not only were sub-
stances of intoxication now more available than ever before, but innova-
tions such as the development of Alexander Wood’s syringe in 1853 and
Oscar Liebreich’s discovery of the psychoactive qualities of Liebig’s chloral
hydrate meant intoxication had begun to take on radical new forms
(Brunton 2000; Snelders et al. 2006).25

Wundt approved of the project, and even encouraged Kraepelin to
expand its scope to study their effects on a host of other mental phenom-
ena. Though Kraepelin’s work in Wundt’s lab was cut short, Kraepelin’s
interest in the experimental investigation into the effects of various intox-
icants and the mind became a project of personal importance, taking it
with him wherever he went, including Munich, Dorpat, and Heidelberg
(Steinberg and Müller 2005; Steinberg and Angermeyer 2001; Kraepelin
1883a, 1892).26 In fact, Kraepelin and Wundt’s exchange marked the
christening of what is arguably the foundational concept of Kraepelin’s pro-
ject of experimental psycho-pathology: that intoxication was model psy-
chosis. Rendered programmatic by his 1895 “Der psychologische Versuch
in der Psychiatrie,” Kraepelin proposed that the study of exogenous psy-
choses could shed light on the nature of endogenous psychoses, providing
an experimental basis for psychiatry (Hildebrandt 1993; Kraepelin 1882,
1895; Müller-Sedgwick et al. 2006). Kraepelin’s aspirations concerning
the development of a new way forward in psychiatry, one supported by
experimental psychology—rather than speculative nosologies or empty

25. Justus Liebig was the ﬁrst to manufacture a synthetic intoxicant (chloral) in 1832,

but was unaware of its effects (Liebig 1832).

26. Steinberg and Himmerich (2013) outline the complex circumstances under which
Kraepelin completed his Habilitation, while the course of Kraepelin’s early academic career
can be found in Kraepelin’s memoirs (1983) and Steinberg and Angermeyer (2001).
Kraepelin lost his job in Paul Flechsig’s psychiatric clinic, a ﬁnancial loss that forced
Kraepelin to propose that his Habilitation be awarded partially on the basis of previously
completed work, as he required the rank of Privatdozent in order to charge fees to his
students. Shortly thereafter, Kraepelin worked at a psychiatric clinic in Munich in the fall
of 1883 and Leubus in 1884, before being able to return to academic life with a profes-
sorship in Dorpat in 1886, and then Heidelberg in 1890. Kraepelin’s built a psychology
laboratory in Dorpat, where he led and conducted research with intoxicants, and his exper-
iments were continued in Heidelberg.

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Intoxicants in the Formation of the 19th Century Biological Subject

anatomical conﬂations—also formed the foundation of his extremely inﬂu-
ential textbook, Psychiatrie (Heckers and Kendler 2020).27

Within the next 12 years, Kraepelin would conduct hundreds of exper-
iments on the different effects of a wide array of intoxicants on different
kinds of reaction time, and psychological processes. Kraepelin’s 1883 pub-
lication focused on how various intoxicants, particularly amyl nitrate, chlo-
roform, ether, and alcohol, affected various forms of reaction time, then
Wundt’s premier psychological research program (Kraepelin 1883a;
Kraepelin 1883b; Danziger 1980). These early studies would blossom into
multiple further sub-projects. Later experiments included, for example,
measurements of the speed and accuracy with which a subject read an
unfamiliar text aloud or their ability to memorize 12-digit series of num-
bers, whilst under the inﬂuence of various drugs (Kraepelin 1892). Other
trials saw subjects, in many cases no other than Kraepelin himself, con-
sume alcohol, morphine, or amyl nitrate before reviewing a battery of
linguistic or conceptual associations, under the researcher’s watchful eye
(Kraepelin 1892). Throughout, Kraepelin went to great, often tiring,
lengths to control for variable dosing, a major problem for the inhalant
studies; the inﬂuence of practice; and impact of secondary bodily effects,
such as the feeling of a full stomach after consuming alcohol (Kraepelin
1883a; Kraepelin 1883b; Kraepelin 1892).28

But this is far from the true extent of the legacy of Kraepelin’s work on
substances of intoxication. For, it is in the context of Kraepelin’s experi-
ments that substances of intoxication are marshalled as testifying witnesses
concerning the fundamental nature of the relationship between the body
and embodiment. Where Wundtian psychology had severed the psychical
from the physical, the phenomenon of intoxication was the physicality of
the body made real in the psychical. Intoxicants were a material substance
that one can perceive as directly interceding in our experiences of embodi-
ment. If pharmacologically induced disordering of the psychological pro-
cess could mirror the effects of psychiatric illnesses, they could, in effect,
serve as a bridge between the scientiﬁc psychological encounter with the
mind and the physiological conception of the body.

27. The ﬁrst edition of Kraepelin’s textbook, published in 1883, was titled Compendium
der Psychiatrie. Its name was changed to Psychiatrie: Ein kurzes Lehrbuch für Studirende und
Aerzte with the second edition, published in 1887.

28. The majority of the Kraepelin’s psychological research with intoxicants conducted
between 1883–1892 is contained within his 1892 publication. To see an example of how
his methodology developed while in Dorpat, see Heinrich Dehio’s publication (Dehio
1887) while a student of Kraepelin’s.

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However, the context of this development is important. Kraepelin had
not been the ﬁrst to introduce intoxicants to psychological tests, earlier
experiments having been run with morphine, wine, and tea by Sigmund
Exner in 1873 and then by Dietl and Vintschgau in 1877 (Exner 1873;
Dietl and Vintschgau 1877). But neither Exner nor Dietl and Vintschgau
understood reaction time to be a psychological phenomenon. Rather, they
framed “Reactionzeit” as a physiological concept, an outward expression of
Helmholtz’s earlier work on the propagation speed of an action potential
across a nerve ﬁber (Exner 1873).29 Further still, though Exner was the
ﬁrst to apply the measurement of reaction time to subjects in a state of
intoxication, substances of intoxication were only introduced as modiﬁers
of the subject’s state of fatigue, which Exner recognized had a consistent
effect on reaction time. Dietl and Vintschgau then sought to expand on
Exner’s limited trials with intoxicants, in part because Exner’s experiments
with intoxicants were all found to be inconclusive (Exner 1873; Dietl and
Vintschgau 1877). If Kraepelin had studied the physiological effects of dif-
ferent intoxicants as Exner, Dietl, and Vintschgau had in 1873 and 1877,
such work would not have had the same effect (Exner 1873; Dietl and
Vintschgau 1877). It is only in studying the effects of intoxicants on
the mind, on the psychical process, that intoxication could be conceptual-
ized as thinking with the body. It was on the testimony of intoxicating
substances that mind and ﬂesh, embodiment and the body, could be sub-
lated within a uniﬁed physiological doctrine, without subjecting mental
states to the reductionism of neural states. This was the beginning of a
conception of the body which was not mechanical but rather dynamically
biological.

Conclusion

5.
Scholarship has understandably focused on Kraepelin’s legacy as a nosolo-
gist, owing to his noted impact on the development of modern psychiatric
classiﬁcation, especially concerning endogenous psychoses. Generally, this
is at the loss of recognizing the impact of Kraepelin’s participation in
Wundtian psychology, and especially his work with substances of intoxi-
cation. Hoff makes strong effort to untangle the relationship between
Kraepelin’s signiﬁcant nosological work and his early interest in experi-
mental psychology, but ultimately marks a distinction between

29. Exner coined the term “reaction time” (Reactionzeit) in 1873, and identiﬁed the
concept as the physiological basis of Friedrich Bessel’s “personal equation” (persönliche
Gleichung). Recognized by Bessel in the 1820’s, Bessel’s personal equation referred to a
problem in astronomy where two observers of the same astral event consistently recorded
different time measurements (Exner 1873).

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Intoxicants in the Formation of the 19th Century Biological Subject

Kraepelin’s earlier psychological research and the role of Wundtian psy-
chological concepts in Kraepelin’s later classiﬁcatory projects (Hoff
1992, 1994, 2015). To this point, Hoff suggests that there is consistency
between Kraepelin’s earlier psychological work and later nosology at the
level of psychological categories, with Kraepelin smoothing out some of
the ambiguities in Wundt’s model (Hoff 2015). A less generous position
is Healy’s perspective that Kraepelin’s initial emphasis on psychology per-
sisted in his later work in the form of an interest in “brain mechanisms”
and “disease processes” (Healy 2009). Even German interest in Kraepeli-
nian psychiatry, Healy suggests, may have relied on Karl Wernicke’s pre-
mature death in 1905 (Healy 2009, pp. 23–4). Heckers and Kendler
similarly identify only the ﬁrst phase of Kraepelin’s nosology (the ﬁrst four
editions of his textbook) with an effort to work through how Wundtian
psychology might be integrated into existing diagnostic, aetiological,
and nosological criteria, speciﬁcally through the textbooks of Shüle and
v. Krafft-Ebing (Heckers and Kendler 2020). To varying degrees, each
of these analyses of Kraepelin’s legacy diminish the inﬂuence of his exper-
imental psychological research in emphasizing Kraepelin’s overt signiﬁ-
cance on the modern world as a nosologist.

Steinberg, alongside his various collaborators, has, more than anyone
else, discussed the impact of Kraepelin’s psychometric research with intox-
icants. While acknowledging the novelty of Kraepelin’s project and his
concept of intoxication as a model psychosis, Steinberg and Müller never-
theless suggest that Kraepelin’s pharmapsychological research program
was a failure, as interest in furthering this type of research would not take
hold for several decades (Steinberg and Müller 2005). But such an assess-
ment relies on a decidedly narrow deﬁnition of the scope and duration of
Kraepelin’s research involving intoxicants. Steinberg and Müller identify
Kraepelin’s research with intoxicants for a 10-year period from his begin-
nings in Wundt’s lab in 1882 to Kraepelin’s publication of the ﬁrst book
on pharmapsychology in 1892 (Steinberg and Müller 2005; Kraepelin
1892). Yet, in 1899, Kraepelin published “Neuere Untersuchungen über
die psychischen Wirkungen des Alkohols,” and “Der Alkoholismus in
München” in 1906 (Kraepelin 1899, 1906). In 1902, Kraepelin and
Oseretzkowsky published the results of their experimental ergographic
studies on the effects of alcohol, coffee, and tea, which directly inﬂuenced
Kraepelin’s development of a “work curve” for psycho-physical labor
(Kraepelin and Oseretzkowsky 1901; Brain 2002; Kraepelin 1903). This,
too, was preceded by Kraepelin and August Hoch’s 1896 “Ueber die
Wirkung der Theebestandtheile auf körperliche und geistige Arbeit”
(Kraepelin and Hoch 1896). Hoch went on to teach at John Hopkins,
where David Macht would introduce the term “pharmapsychology” to

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English and even conduct his own reaction time trials involving opiate
alkaloids (Kraepelin and Hoch 1896; Campbell 2007; Macht and Isaacs
1917). Here, psychological research on intoxicants directly shaped
Kraepelin’s understanding of the emerging neuroses of factory life.
Without even taking into account his work on alcoholism through the
1890’s and into the 1920’s, it is clear that psychological experimentation
with intoxicants was deeply formative of Kraepelin’s work into the
twentieth century, with impacts reaching toward the end of his career.

For now, this has been a brief effort to outline some of the major devel-
opments underlying the emergence of the biological subject in nineteenth-
century German science. Emphasis rests on how Kraepelin’s psychological
experiments with intoxicants overcame conceptual ambiguities in the
Wundtian psychology’s understanding of higher-level psychological pro-
cesses, contextualizing them through a physical, intoxicating referent.
Such work was at the very forefront of the emergence of the biological sub-
ject, unifying the body with the dynamic, lived experience of the psychical
in an experimental context. Where the vital substance concept had been all
but erased by the rise of neo-mechanism, the perceptional modality of
intoxication, that had given rise to the vital substance concept, endured.
Intoxicated ways of knowing had been elemental to the development of a
novel science of embodiment, providing a physical referent for psychical
phenomena when Wundt’s lab was still in its infancy. The impact of this
distinct way of knowing can be seen above all else in the developing
scientiﬁc understanding of the lifeworld of conscious perception, of the
experience of embodiment (the world of intoxication). When efforts at
mechanistic and physiological accounts of mental phenomena fell short
of expectations in the 1870’s–1880’s, it was the science of embodiment
that ultimately provided the most persuasive critique. The by-product
was a suggestion that the understanding of embodiment and the study
of the body are part of a shared conceptual framework: a science of higher
order mental life and a science of the body. The study of living embodi-
ment was irreducible to physio-chemical processes in light of the mind’s
dynamic encounter with the world, and yet was nevertheless conceptually
comprised of the Stoff of physio-chemical processes. Institutionally, this
twofold conception of biologism, of being a biological subject, is reﬂected
in the structure of the modern psychology and neuroscience departments,
where, even as psychology and neuroscience share one roof, the science of
experimental psychology remains irreducible to neuro-chemical anatomy.
The new human being that emerged was vital, without being vitalistic, is
purely physical, without being materialistic. The inﬂuence of this shift not
only endures to this day it had an almost immediate effect on the philos-
ophies and social theories of the late nineteenth century, from Nietzsche’s

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philosophy of the body to Weber’s conception of the subject. It may be the
case that the emergence of the biological subject stands almost entirely on
the legacy of our varied encounters with the intoxicated body.

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