1831

Rostan coins the word organicism (Duffin, 272). His “confident optimism that organic lesions would eventually be found for all diseases ended discussion of diseases still awaiting their anatomic correlative: functional illness was not (yet) disease” (299). Laennec’s “apparent vitalism” “represents a repudiation, or at least a mistrust, of the reductionist language that auscultation had generated” (301). He “refused to endorse the narrow extrapolation of organicism, which reduced the unknown essence and cause of disease to the physical change. Organicism was refuted by the stories of his patients and by the psychic or unknown causes of their illnesses, which were being neglected in the overenthusiastic application of his own anatomical method” (302).