It must be confessed that he was somewhat less popular with his contemporaries who did not belong to his immediate circle of friends and students. One of the reasons for this was his genius, which no generation seems ready to {161} acknowledge in any of its members. Another reason was his continued misunderstanding with Broussais. Broussais was the medical theorist of the hour, and medical theories have always been popular, while medical observation has had to wait for due recognition. There were undoubtedly good points in Broussais' theories that Laennec failed to appreciate. This is the only blot on a perfect career, taking it all in all, whether as man or as physician. It can easily be understood with what impatience Laennec, entirely devoted himself to observation, would take up the study of what he considered mere theory, and it is easy to forgive him his lack of appreciation. Benjamin Ward Richardson says: "It was a common saying regarding Laennec by his compeers that, while he was without a rival in diagnosis, he was not a good practitioner; which means that he was not a good practitioner, according to their ideas of practice, heroic and fearful. To us, Laennec would now be a practitioner very heroic; so much so, that I doubt if any medical man living would, for the life of him, take some of his prescriptions. But in his own time, when so little was known of the great system of natural cure, he would be easily out of court. It was amply sufficient against him that he had a glimmering of the truth as to the existence of a considerable run of cases of organic disease, for which the so-called practice of remedial cure by drugs, bloodlettings and other heroic plans, could do no good but was likely to do grievous harm." We are reminded of Morgagni's refusal to permit bloodletting in his own case, though he practised it himself on others. Like Laennec, Morgagni seems to have doubted the efficacy of bloodletting at a time when unfortunately all medical men were agreed that it was the sovereign remedy. If Laennec was not popular with his immediate {162} contemporaries, succeeding generations have more than made up for the seeming neglect. Less than twenty-five years after his death, Austin Flint, here in America, hailed him as one of the five or six greatest medical men of all times. Forty years after his death, Professor Chauffard, himself one of the distinguished medical men of the nineteenth century, said: