Georg Ernst Stahl

Georg Ernst Stahl (born Oct. 21, 1660, Ansbach, Franconia [Germany]—died May 14, 1734, Berlin, Prussia) was a German educator, chemist, and esteemed medical theorist and practitioner. His chemical theory of phlogiston dominated European chemistry until the “Chemical Revolution” at the end of the 18th century.

Early life and education

Stahl was the son of Johann Lorentz Stahl, secretary to the court council in Ansbach and later secretary to the Anhalt-Brandenburg Church Consistory. Stahl attended the local gymnasium in Ansbach before moving to the University of Jena in 1679 to study medicine. The faculty of medicine at Jena was then a stronghold of the iatrochemical school, which stressed the unity of chemistry and medicine and the application of chemistry to medical phenomena. After his graduation in 1684, Stahl worked as an unsalaried lecturer at Jena until he became the personal physician of the duke of Saxon-Weimar, Johann Ernst, in 1687. In 1694 Stahl became professor of theoretical medicine at the newly founded Prussian University in Halle. He married three times; his first two wives died of puerperal fever.

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Teachings in medicine

What inspired 18th-century vitalism was Stahl’s thesis of the difference between living organisms and inorganic bodies. From his observation that organic bodies decompose rapidly after life ceases, while inorganic bodies remain chemically stable, he concluded that the strong corruptibility of organic matter must result from its material nature (that is, chemical composition) and that there was an immaterial reason that kept a living body from its natural decomposition. Stahl identified this reason with the principle of life, which he sometimes called “natura” (nature) and sometimes “anima” (soul). Anima functioned with a natural reason (“ratio”), in contrast to logical, critical reasoning (“ratiocinatio”) that the rational soul performed. This natural reason of anima was the source of the remarkable self-healing power of the organism, and when misled, such as by emotions, it produced illnesses. This double character of the vital principle made it the foundation of physiology and pathology, and it dictated that physicians should work to facilitate or restore its healing power based on attentive observation.

Stahl was opposed to the medical mechanists, known as iatro-mechanists, for they eliminated the role of anima and reduced every vital phenomenon, physiological or pathological, to mechanical principles. Machines, he argued, would never produce the alacrity, precision, and spontaneity with which the organism responded to its needs and threats. Early literature on Stahl often implied that his theory rejected any part of mechanism in vital functions. That is not the case. Stahl assigned a great place to what he called tonic motion (“motus tonicus”), a contractive and relaxative movement of body parts or tissues that played a key role in metabolism—although, as always, he saw anima as the agent that directed the motion. The participation of anima in physiology and pathology thus made the living organism distinct from a machine made of dead material parts. Although later vitalists would gradually discard anima in their teachings, they continued to highlight Stahl’s thesis on the distinction between living organisms and lifeless bodies or machines.

Chemistry and alchemy

Stahl had a corpuscularian, and largely mechanistic, interpretation of material substances and chemical processes. Natural substances resulted from the aggregation or compounding (mixtio) of composite corpuscles of different orders, while chemical processes were the recombinations of the constituent corpuscles of starting materials. Fermentation, for example, was essentially the release of sulfurous particles in the fermentable materials. This formulation rejected not only the Aristotelian form in the explanation of material constitution and changes but also the theories of fermentation prevalent prior to his time that stressed the ferment as a somewhat magic agent for almost all chemical processes.

Stahl does not seem to have claimed the credit for inventing the theory of phlogiston. A substance underlying all inflammable matters had been named by the 17th-century English scientist Johann Joachim Becher as phlogiston and in the 16th century by the German-Swiss physician and alchemist Paracelsus as the principle of sulfur. The Paracelsian principle worked like the Aristotelian element to the extent that it showed no material consistency in the different substances of which it was said to form a part. Stahl postulated, and endeavored to demonstrate by experimentation, that phlogiston remained materially uniform in all bodies that contained it. Phlogiston could be released into the air from inflamed sulfurous minerals, from vegetable substances in fermentation, or from animal parts in putrefaction. It reduced calces (residue after a metal or mineral has been calcined or roasted) into their metallic form, restoring their lustre, tinkling sound, and fusibility; when losing their phlogiston, metals were reversed into calces. Inflammation (that is, combustion) and calcination were thus both processes in which phlogiston was released. Stahl’s explanation of inflammation was elaborated by 18th-century chemists as an explanation of combustion before the French chemist Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier replaced it with the theory of oxidation, which set off the so-called Chemical Revolution.

Stahl’s experimental expertise is shown in the richness of his ingenious chemical operations on oils, salts, acids, and metals. Stahl wrote frequently on subjects of practical chemistry—such as brewing, dyeing, saltpetre production, and ore processing—and advocated the contribution of chemical science and industries to national economy. Stahl believed in the alchemical transmutation of metals early in his career but turned skeptical of alchemy later.

Service at court

While he never resigned from the University of Halle, Stahl moved to Berlin in 1715 to serve as the first royal physician and court counselor to Frederick William I of Prussia, a post that he held until his death in 1734. From 1715 Stahl also presided over Berlin’s Medical Board, which in 1725 became the Higher Medical Board for the whole of Prussia. He was instrumental in the founding of the Berlin Medical-Surgical College in 1723, and he contributed to the creation of the chair of economy and cameralism, the first of its kind in Germany, at the University of Halle in 1727.

Influence

Stahl was an influential teacher. Several of his students rose to prominence in German academia and government administration, and Halle remained a strong base of support for Stahl’s chemical and medical ideas through most of the 18th century. Although his fame as a medical thinker was somewhat eclipsed by Hermann Boerhaave at the State University of Leiden in the Netherlands and Albrecht von Haller at the University of Göttingen in Germany, whose medical ideas became the mainstream in Europe, Stahl found potent followers at the medical school of Montpellier, France, and his ideas resurfaced in Germany in Romanticism. Stahl’s phlogistic chemistry was nearly universally accepted throughout Europe until the so-called “Chemical Revolution,” led by the French chemist Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier, replaced it in the 1780s.