John Thelwall (27 July 1764 – 17 February 1834) was a radical British orator, writer, political reformer, journalist, poet, elocutionist and speech therapist. Life Thelwall was born in Covent Garden, London, but was descended from a Welsh family which had its seat at Plas y Ward, Denbighshire. He was the son of a silk merchant, Joseph Thelwall, who died in 1772 leaving the family in economic distress. He attended Highgate school between 1774 and 1777 but had to leave school to help his mother, who had decided to keep the silk business running. Thelwall's fondness for books showed up at an early age, earning him the scorn of his mother. It also made it impossible for him to fulfill an apprenticeship as a tailor. Young Thelwall also tried to make a living in an attorney office, but his morals and eccentricity made him quit the job and try to depend on his writing as a journalist and editor. Thelwall also developed a significant interest in medical science and attended lectures at Guy's and St Thomas hospitals in London; he was friends with Astley Cooper, a renowned surgeon in London. Thelwall's particular interest lay in understanding and participating in topical debates concerning cognition and 'vitality'. Jasmin Solomonescu argues that "Thelwall's medical training became compounded with his radical politics and developing theories of language and the imagination to provide a model and a lexicon for his vision of reform". In 1793, Thelwall presented a paper at the Physical Society in London in which he debated the subject of 'animal vitality'; the paper was subsequently published as An Essay Towards a Definition of Animal Vitality (1793). Considering the views of several well-known sources, Thelwall proposed that vitality or life was a combination of 'specific organisation' and 'proper stimuli'; blood is the means by which the 'stimuli' is conveyed to different parts of the body: 'I consider the blood independent of its nutritive power, as the specific medium by which the stimuli must be conveyed to the different parts of the organised frame, so as to produce the Vital Action. This Blood in its passage through the Lungs, collects a something, which generates a specific heat....But what is this something, this vivifying principle?...Something that is contained in the atmosphere, something of a powerful and exquisitely subtile nature'. Thelwall's views formed part of a larger debate concerning the relationship between the emerging scientific understandings and