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Abstract
At the most general level my dissertation concerns the question of German identity. It does this by analyzing the career of Emil du Bois-Reymond (1818-1896), a physiologist best known for his late essays on science and culture and for his mechanistic view of life. Together with Hermann Helmholtz, Ernst Brucke, and Carl Ludwig, du Bois-Reymond wanted to eliminate reference to vital forces in biology; to this end he virtually created the modern discipline of electrophysiology.
Du Bois-Reymond's efforts to reform science can be characterized as displaced politics. As a member of the Prussian educated elite, du Bois-Reymond enjoyed little of the economic and political freedom of his middle class counterparts in Britain and France; consequently, he turned to culture for a source of hope and security. Both his decision to become a scientist and the instrumental science he pursued expressed a liberal desire for change, a desire, I argue, underlying much of the brilliant originality and tragic limitation of du Bois-Reymond himself.
