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Generally speaking, vitalism is no longer seen as acceptable within scientific discussion, and unfortunately this has partly come about as a result of careless misuse of terms without an understanding of their context. Understanding the evolution and the quality of this thought process is not about chewing over dusty historical narratives and circular debates, but it isn't about applying arbitrary definitions either. The tensions that led to that evolution are still ongoing within current debates on technique, evidence (or the lack thereof ), and most in the overall approach to well-being and healing. Practicing a therapeutic profession is not simply a matter of showing up and working. The education, therapeutic alliance, and clinical reasoning that practicing entails rests on a philosophy that is too often forgotten, or becomes so deeply embedded in one's psyche that one can lose sight of it. Whether or not it is spelled out in introductory courses (and it should be), every practice rests on a philosophy, and that philosophy has a history. Knowing what has gone before, what impact it had, and why, allows one to understand and reflect on the context, gaps, and potential of one's own practice. Most importantly, as established by other researchers currently reexamining the role of vitalism in integrative medicine, 4 there is a critical difference between perceiving a given philosophy (whether vitalistic or mechanistic) as dogma intertwined with professional identity, and perceiving it as a lens through which to reflect, consider, and evolve. 5 All too often, overspecialization—and too much focus only on practical considerations—can lead to a failure to grasp the broader, messy, uncertain reality surrounding practice. In medical education this is becoming ever more evident, and the solution that educators in the medical community are beginning to apply (with spectacular results), is the integration of the interdisciplinary approach known as the Medical Humanities, which incorporates history, philosophy, and even literature into medical school curricula so as to better contextualize and ground student learning. In fact, it is now taken for granted that "biomedical reductionism" is no longer acceptable in modern medicine, which suggests that those who criticize the biomedical fields might wish to explore this rapidly evolving interdisciplinary development further. 6 This article is written based on those same principles. Vitalism's fall from grace began with the scientific revolution around the turn of the 18th century when a widespread intellectual movement known as the Enlightenment began to discredit all perspectives that could be associated with superstition, spirituality, or speculation. 7 The reasoning was that this would do away with the bloody religious warfare that had ravaged Europe for centuries, and idealistically usher in a new Age of Reason in its place. This led to the wholesale rejection of whole swaths of worldviews and forms of expression and belief that ended up in what scholars have called "the wastebasket of history." 8 Despite the manifold gifts of this dawn of reason, its more problematic legacies include a devout focus on mechanistic interpretations of natural processes, both environmental and physiological, and a strong tendency toward what is known as presentism, which is a tendency to uncritically interpret past events in view of present-day values. But what does that mean in practice, and what does it have to do with fascia? THE LIFE FORCE In all likelihood, if someone spoke of the zoodynamic life force today, they would be summarily dismissed as spouting "woo"—for want of a better term. The phrase was used in the early 20th century by Dr. Andrea Rabagliatti (1843–1930) when describing connective tissue as a matrix transporting and supporting both structure and function of the circulatory and lymphatic systems. 9 In short, zoodynamic life force is a different term for something that today has received new nomenclature that is more accurate within the framework of our current common scientific language. He was talking about fascia. Though Rabagliatti used strange vocabulary, he was not only heading in the right direction, he was also an important link in a chain of practitioners to whom we owe many aspects of integrative health and manual therapy techniques. In the 1930s and 1940s, Dewanchand Varma (died ca. 1946) and Randolph Stone (1890–1981) respectively influenced diverging branches in the evolution of manual therapies. Varma taught his ayurvedically inspired "pranatherapy" based on the principle that disease is caused by obstructions to the free flow of the internal vital force—which he called prana—and developed manual techniques to release these obstructions. Stone, also influenced by more esoteric currents, including theosophy, Rosicrucianism, and Paracelsianism, developed what is known as polarity therapy, with clear roots in mesmerism—all theories long consigned to "the wastebasket of history" until just a couple of decades ago, when they became objects of historical research. 10 46 m a s s a g e & b o d y w o r k n o v e m b e r / d e c e m b e r 2 0 2 0