The Vitalist Approach

Developed in the tradition of ecological regional planning that shaped Patrick Geddes (1854–1932), Vitalism grows out of a “living” natural history that closely links medicine and botany and aims not merely to catalogue nature, but to understand how Nature operates. This intellectual lineage is anchored in the University of Montpellier’s role as an early centre of formal medical training, alongside its renowned plant garden—formalized when Cardinal Conrad of Urach granted the universitas medicorum its statutes on August 17th 1220.

In this view, Nature is not an external “environment” opposed to humanity; it is a dynamic process—a becoming—and a living force that includes organisms-in-environments, embedded in the unity of Nature along with their activities. Vitalism is not a mystical “principle,” but a scientific claim that mechanistic descriptions alone cannot fully account for distinctively biological phenomena. Vitalist medicine therefore apprehends the living person as an undivided totality: at once biological, and also social, environmental, linguistic, and cultural.