14:54 Nov 22, 2009 

There is now confusion about the distinction between the two terms. To philosophers holism means ‘any doctrine emphasising the priority of the whole over its parts’, with specific uses in linguistics and the philosophy of mind.4 To ecologists it means the black box approach to analysing ecosystems, studying inputs and outputs rather than the individual parts of a system.5 And to psychiatrists it means ‘the thesis that the study of parts cannot explain the whole’.6 Wholism, on the other hand, is rarely found in dictionaries, and in the rare exceptions where it is mentioned7 the reader is merely referred to holism. However, there is a distinction:
***holism presupposes that the whole is in some way greater than the sum of its parts; wholism does not.***
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There is nothing new about the idea that wholism and holism are distinct,9 although the treatises in which holism is discussed are often riddled with jargon that obscures clarity of understanding. It is possible and often desirable to be wholistic, but holism is an unproven hypothesis.
http://beta.medicinescomplete.com/journals/fact/current/fact...

14:50 Nov 22, 2009 

The Greek word holos came from an Indo-European root ‘SOLO’, meaning whole, firm, sound, or correct: solid means wholly reliable and a holograph is written wholly in one’s own hand. But whole (and holy) are not from holos; they have a different Indo-European root, ‘KAILO’, which means of good omen or unharmed: someone who is hale is whole and healthy, and the greeting ‘hail’ is short for ‘be healthy’. Similarly, holism is not the same as wholism.

It was the South African statesman General Jan Christian Smuts who invented the concept of holism.3 The Oxford English Dictionary defines it as ‘the tendency in nature to produce wholes from the ordered grouping of unit structures’, which, Smuts said, ‘is seen at all stages of existence’.
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Then, in the 1930s, the idea of wholism was invented as a sort of pun on holism. It was defined as ‘the doctrine or belief that wholes must be studied as such and that the parts can only be understood in relation to the wholes to which they belong’. At first this was used in a philosophical sense to refer to events, but later it too drifted and became used in the context of psychology and psychotherapy.
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