The diligent attempts of researchers to isolate an organic cause for suicide reflect the consternation with which society and the medical establishment more specifically reacted to voluntary death at the beginning of the nineteenth century. This project also led medical researchers such as Xavier Bichat to speculate on the existence of a principle that sustained life and enabled the body to resist death. Similarly, the pathologist F. J. V. Broussais remarked, ‘it is necessary to recognize in mankind the existence of a propensity for staying alive. I do not know the seat of this propensity, nor what its organ. I believe only that it exists. I believe that because I feel it in myself and see its effects in others’. According to Broussais, in the absence of a ‘suicide organ’, one could not effectively overcome an instinct of self-preservation, thus explaining why some individuals were unsuccessful in their suicide attempts. This theory constructs the body as far from self-destructive and instead anchored to life, the antithesis of the Freudian notion of the death instinct and a reflection of the vitalist philosophy that was in the ascendancy at the turn of the nineteenth century owing to the work of doctors like Bichat.