Berzelius, Wohler, and Vitalism

As the eighteenth century gave way to the nineteenth, Jons Jacob Berzelius emerged as one of the leading scientists of his generation. Berzelius, whose training was in medicine, had wide-ranging interests and made numerous contributions in diverse areas of 

What particularly seemed to excite Wohler and his mentor Berzelius about this experiment had very little to do with vitalism. Berzelius was interested in cases in which two clearly different materials had the same elemental composition, and he invented the term isomerism to define it. The fact that an inorganic compound (ammonium cyanate) of molecular formula CH4N2O could be transformed into an organic compound (urea) of the same molecular formula had an important bearing on the concept of isomerism. 

This German stamp depicts a molecular model of urea and was issued in 1982 to commemorate the hundredth anniversary of Wohler s death. The computer graphic that opened this introductory chapter is also a model of urea. 

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Almost two centuries had elapsed after Wohler s historical comment cited in his letter to Berzelius in the year 1835 on the ongoing development of organic chemistry his monstrous and boundless thickef is now sufficiently more dense and complex than ever and quite forbidding to strangers Natural products chemistry, a vital section of organic chemistry,... 

However, even after all traces of Berzelius s ideas on vitalism had been disproved by experiment, his associated term organic survived.- After Wohler had shown thathumans as well as organisms could make organic chemicals, the term organic chemistryhecame the chemical study of any carbon-based compounds, and that usage remains. 

The development of biochemistry as a subject may be traced to Lavoisier s work on the chemistry of life258 and to Prout and Berzelius.259 The age-old question about the nature of life has left organic chemistry with a legacy of thinking about vitalism which, despite claims to the contrary, is still associated in the popular mind with the synthesis of urea by Wohler in 1828, by which it is alleged vital forces were banished for ever from organic chemistry.260 Yet another article on the Wohler synthesis... 

Wohler wrote to Berzelius I can make urea without the necessity of kidney, or even an animal, whether man or dog. However, he made no claim to have disproved vitalism, and both the ammonia and the cyanic acid that he used had been derived from natural sources. The importance of Wohler s urea synthesis was that both ammonium cyanate and urea had the same composition, and it therefore provided an early example of isomerism. 

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