A New Concept in Pathology: Error

Abstract

In our Essay we compared the ontological conception of disease, in which disease is portrayed as the qualitative opposite of health, with the positivist conception, which derives it quantitatively from the normal state. When disease is considered as an evil, therapy is given for a revalorization; when disease is considered as deficiency or excess, therapy consists in compensation. Against Bernard’s conception of disease we set the existence of illnesses such as alkaptonuria, whose symptom can in no way be derived from the normal state and whose process — the incomplete metabolism of tyrosine — bears no quantitative relation to the normal process.⁵⁹ It must be acknowledged today that even then our argument could have been further solidified by being more broadly buttressed with examples, by considering albinism and cystinuria.