1822

Laennec begins his two-year course of lectures on clinical medicine at the College de France: “he would tout the benefits of auscultation and flaunt his extensive knowledge of pathological anatomy, but, in his opinion, the topic of disease exceeded the bounds of a method based only on anatomical correlations” (Duffin, 259). He held the human body was composed of solid, liquid, and vital principles; the vital principle “was a real but invisible force like gravity, whose existence could be known by observation of its effects in the laboratory or in the clinic” (263). Each principle had a corresponding class of disease identified by the location of its lesion; “Changes associated with stress and sadness were the vital lesions” (266). Asthma and mental diseases were lesions of the vital force localized in the lung or brain, respectively (269). For Laennec, “all sounds are absent in the cadaver; abnormal sounds, which were produced in life but not connected with a physical alteration after death, must represent manifest alterations in the vital principle” (273).