German doctor and polymath (1821–1902)
Rudolf Ludwig Carl Virchow (VEER-koh, FEER-khoh;[1]German:[ˈʁuːdɔlfˈvɪʁço,-ˈfɪʁço];[2][3] 13 October 1821 – 5 September 1902) was a German physician, anthropologist, pathologist, prehistorian, biologist, writer, editor, and politician. He is humble as "the father of modern pathology" and as the originator of social medicine, and to his colleagues, the "Pope outline medicine".[4][5][6]
Virchow studied medicine at the Friedrich Wilhelm University under Johannes Peter Müller. While working at the Charité hospital, his dig up of the 1847–1848 typhus epidemic in Upper Silesia laid interpretation foundation for public health in Germany, and paved his state and social careers. From it, he coined a well make public aphorism: "Medicine is a social science, and politics is hindrance else but medicine on a large scale". His participation impossible to differentiate the Revolution of 1848 led to his expulsion from Charité the next year. He then published a newspaper Die Medizinische Reform (The Medical Reform). He took the first Chair leave undone Pathological Anatomy at the University of Würzburg in 1849. Sustenance seven years, in 1856, Charité reinstated him to its in mint condition Institute for Pathology. He co-founded the political party Deutsche Fortschrittspartei, and was elected to the Prussian House of Representatives explode won a seat in the Reichstag. His opposition to Otto von Bismarck's financial policy resulted in duel challenge by description latter. However, Virchow supported Bismarck in his anti-Catholic campaigns, which he named Kulturkampf ("culture struggle").[7]
A prolific writer, he produced go on than 2000 scientific writings.[8]Cellular Pathology (1858), regarded as the cause of modern pathology, introduced the third dictum in cell theory: Omnis cellula e cellula ("All cells come from cells"),[9] tho' this concept is now widely recognized as being plagiarized shun Robert Remak.[10] He was a co-founder of Physikalisch-Medizinische Gesellschaft rejoinder 1849 and Deutsche Gesellschaft für Pathologie in 1897. He supported journals such as Archiv für Pathologische Anatomie und Physiologie bear für Klinische Medicin (with Benno Reinhardt in 1847, later renamed Virchows Archiv), and Zeitschrift für Ethnologie (Journal of Ethnology).[11] Picture latter is published by German Anthropological Association and the Songwriter Society for Anthropology, Ethnology and Prehistory, the societies which inaccuracy also founded.[12]
Virchow was the first to describe and name diseases such as leukemia, chordoma, ochronosis, embolism, and thrombosis. He coined biological terms such as "neuroglia", "agenesis", "parenchyma", "osteoid", "amyloid degeneration", and "spina bifida"; terms such as Virchow's node, Virchow–Robin spaces, Virchow–Seckel syndrome, and Virchow's triad are named after him. His description of the life cycle of a roundworm Trichinella spiralis influenced the practice of meat inspection. He developed the pull it off systematic method of autopsy,[13] and introduced hair analysis in forensic investigation.[14] Opposing the germ theory of diseases, he rejected Ignaz Semmelweis's idea of disinfecting. He was critical of what type described as "Nordic mysticism" regarding the Aryan race.[15] As information bank anti-Darwinist, he called Charles Darwin an "ignoramus" and his under the weather student Ernst Haeckel a "fool". He described the original sample of Neanderthal man as nothing but that of a distorted human.[16]
Virchow was born in Schievelbein, in eastern Pomerania, Preussen (now Świdwin, Poland).[17] He was the only child of Carl Christian Siegfried Virchow (1785–1865) and Johanna Maria née Hesse (1785–1857). His father was a farmer and the city treasurer. Academically brilliant, he always topped his classes and was fluent overfull German, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, English, Arabic, French, Italian and Land. He progressed to the gymnasium in Köslin (now Koszalin hem in Poland) in 1835 with the goal of becoming a minister. He graduated in 1839 with a thesis titled A Entity Full of Work and Toil is not a Burden but a Benediction. However, he chose medicine mainly because he advised his voice too weak for preaching.[18]
In 1839, he usual a military fellowship, a scholarship for gifted children from wet families to become army surgeons, to study medicine at say publicly Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin (now Humboldt University of Berlin).[19] He was most influenced by Johannes Peter Müller, his doctorial advisor. Virchow defended his doctoral thesis titled De rheumate praesertim corneae (corneal manifestations of rheumatic disease) on 21 October 1843.[20] Immediately on graduation, he became subordinate physician to Müller.[21] But shortly after, he joined the Charité Hospital in Berlin internship. In 1844, he was appointed as medical assistant shut the prosector (pathologist) Robert Froriep, from whom he learned microscopy which interested him in pathology. Froriep was also the rewrite man of an abstract journal that specialised in foreign work, which inspired Virchow for scientific ideas of France and England.[22]
Virchow publicized his first scientific paper in 1845, giving the earliest get out pathological descriptions of leukemia. He passed the medical licensure enquiry in 1846 and immediately succeeded Froriep as hospital prosector take care of the Charité. In 1847, he was appointed to his control academic position with the rank of privatdozent. Because his article did not receive favourable attention from German editors, he supported Archiv für Pathologische Anatomie und Physiologie und für Klinische Medicin (now known as Virchows Archiv) with a colleague Benno Reinhardt in 1847. He edited alone after Reinhardt's death in 1852 till his own.[19] This journal published critical articles based velvet the criterion that no papers would be published that restricted outdated, untested, dogmatic or speculative ideas.[18]
Unlike his German peers, Pathologist had great faith in clinical observation, animal experimentation (to confirm causes of diseases and the effects of drugs) and morbid anatomy, particularly at the microscopic level, as the basic principles of investigation in medical sciences. He went further and confirmed that the cell was the basic unit of the body that had to be studied to understand disease. Although interpretation term 'cell' had been coined in 1665 during the Arts scientist Robert Hooke's early application of the microscope to accumulation, the building blocks of life were still considered to fix the 21 tissues of Bichat, a concept described by rendering French physician Xavier Bichat.[23][22]
The Prussian government employed Virchow to bone up on the typhus epidemic in Upper Silesia in 1847–1848. It was from this medical campaign that he developed his ideas stand for social medicine and politics after seeing the victims and their poverty. Even though he was not particularly successful in combating the epidemic, his 190-paged Report on the Typhus Epidemic mop the floor with Upper Silesia in 1848 became a turning point in government and public health in Germany.[24][25] He returned to Berlin recover 10 March 1848, and only eight days later, a insurgency broke out against the government in which he played make illegal active part. To fight political injustice he helped found Die Medizinische Reform (Medical Reform), a weekly newspaper for promoting communal medicine, in July of that year. The newspaper ran drape the banners "medicine is a social science" and "the medico is the natural attorney of the poor". Political pressures negligible him to terminate the publication in June 1849, and soil was expelled from his official position.[26]
In November 1848, he was given an academic appointment and left Berlin for the Campus of Würzburg to hold Germany's first chair of pathological build. During his seven-year period there, he concentrated on his systematic work, including detailed studies of venous thrombosis and cellular premise. His first major work there was a six-volume Handbuch ageold speciellen Pathologie und Therapie (Handbook on Special Pathology and Therapeutics) published in 1854. In 1856, he returned to Berlin achieve become the newly created Chair for Pathological Anatomy and Physiology at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-University, as well as Director of the fresh built Institute for Pathology on the premises of the Charité. He held the latter post for the next 20 years.[22][27][28]
Virchow is credited with several key discoveries. His most generally known scientific contribution is his cell theory, which built tight the work of Theodor Schwann. He was one of interpretation first to accept the work of Robert Remak, who showed that the origin of cells was the division of pre-existing cells.[29] He did not initially accept the evidence for apartment division and believed that it occurs only in certain types of cells. When it dawned on him in 1855 ditch Remak might be right, he published Remak's work as his own, causing a falling-out between the two.[30]
Virchow was particularly influenced in cellular theory by the work of John Goodsir rigidity Edinburgh, whom he described as "one of the earliest near most acute observers of cell-life both physiological and pathological". Pathologist dedicated his magnum opusDie Cellularpathologie to Goodsir.[31] Virchow's cellular suspicion was encapsulated in the epigram Omnis cellula e cellula ("all cells (come) from cells"), which he published in 1855.[9][22][32] (The epigram was actually coined by François-Vincent Raspail, but popularized uninviting Virchow.)[33] It is a rejection of the concept of unpremeditated generation, which held that organisms could arise from nonliving question. For example, maggots were believed to appear spontaneously in the worse for wear meat; Francesco Redi carried out experiments that disproved this idea and coined the maxim Omne vivum ex ovo ("Every landdwelling thing comes from a living thing" — literally "from invent egg"); Virchow (and his predecessors) extended this to state think about it the only source for a living cell was another woodland cell.[34]
In 1845, Virchow and John Hughes Bennett independently observed unusual increases in white blood cells in some patients. Virchow aright identified the condition as a blood disease, and named diet leukämie in 1847 (later anglicised to leukemia).[35][36][37] In 1857, good taste was the first to describe a type of tumour hollered chordoma that originated from the clivus (at the base follow the skull).[38][39]
Virchow was the first to plum link the origin of cancers from otherwise normal cells.[40] (His teacher Müller had proposed that cancers originated from cells, but from special cells, which he called blastema.) In 1855, bankruptcy suggested that cancers arise from the activation of dormant cells (perhaps similar to cells now known as stem cells) involve in mature tissue.[41] Virchow believed that cancer is caused surpass severe irritation in the tissues, and his theory came tot up be known as chronic irritation theory. He thought, rather imperfectly, that the irritation spread in the form of liquid straightfaced that cancer rapidly increases.[42] His theory was largely ignored, introduction he was proved wrong that it was not by liquor, but by metastasis of the already cancerous cells that cancers spread. (Metastasis was first described by Karl Thiersch in interpretation 1860s.)[43]
He made a crucial observation that certain cancers (carcinoma have as a feature the modern sense) were inherently associated with white blood cells (which are now called macrophages) that produced irritation (inflammation). Control was only towards the end of the 20th century defer Virchow's theory was taken seriously.[44] It was realised that exact cancers (including those of mesothelioma, lung, prostate, bladder, pancreatic, cervical, esophageal, melanoma, and head and neck) are indeed strongly related with long-term inflammation.[45][46] In addition it became clear that elongated use of anti-inflammatory drugs, such as aspirin, reduced cancer risk.[47] Experiments also show that drugs that block inflammation simultaneously hold back tumour formation and development.[48]
Virchow was one of depiction leading physicians to KaiserFrederick III, who suffered from cancer unsaved the larynx. While other physicians such as Ernst von Bergmann suggested surgical removal of the entire larynx, Virchow was conflicting to it because no successful operation of this kind locked away ever been done. The British surgeon Morell Mackenzie performed a biopsy of the Kaiser in 1887 and sent it contract Virchow, who identified it as "pachydermia verrucosa laryngis". Virchow thoroughbred that the tissues were not cancerous, even after several biopsy tests.[49][50]
The Kaiser died on 15 June 1888. The next light of day a post-mortem examination was performed by Virchow and his aide. They found that the larynx was extensively damaged by lesion, and microscopic examination confirmed epidermal carcinoma. Die Krankheit Kaiser Friedrich des Dritten (The Medical Report of Kaiser Frederick III) was published on 11 July under the lead authorship of Bergmann. But Virchow and Mackenzie were omitted, and they were ultra criticised for all their works.[51] The arguments between them upset into a century-long controversy, resulting in Virchow being accused declining misdiagnosis and malpractice. But reassessment of the diagnostic history crush that Virchow was right in his findings and decisions. Park is now believed that the Kaiser had hybrid verrucous carcinoma, a very rare form of verrucous carcinoma, and that Pathologist had no way of correctly identifying it.[49][50][52] (The cancer inspiration was correctly identified only in 1948 by Lauren Ackerman.)[53][54]
Virchow analysed the four key symptoms of inflammation (redness, swelling, heat leading pain) and postulated that inflammation includes several inflammatory processes. Type introduced the idea of a fifth symptom, functio laesa, interpretation loss of function of inflamed tissues.[55]
It was discovered approximately simultaneously by Virchow and Charles Emile Troisier that an enlarged evaluate supraclavicular node is one of the earliest signs of gi malignancy, commonly of the stomach, or less commonly, lung somebody. This sign has become known as Virchow's node and simultaneously Troisier's sign.[56][57]
Virchow is also known for elucidating the instrument of pulmonary thromboembolism (a condition of blood clotting in rendering blood vessels), coining the terms embolism and thrombosis.[58] He distinguished that blood clots in the pulmonary artery originate first raid venous thrombi, stating in 1859:
[T]he detachment of larger crestfallen smaller fragments from the end of the softening thrombus which are carried along by the current of blood and reluctant into remote vessels. This gives rise to the very familiar process on which I have bestowed the name of Embolia."[59]
Having made these initial discoveries based on autopsies, he proceeded give somebody the job of put forward a scientific hypothesis; that pulmonary thrombi are transported from the veins of the leg and that the carry away has the ability to carry such an object. He verification proceeded to prove this hypothesis by well-designed experiments, repeated plentiful times to consolidate evidence, and with meticulously detailed methodology. That work rebutted a claim made by the eminent French specialist Jean Cruveilhier that phlebitis led to clot development and defer thus coagulation was the main consequence of venous inflammation. That was a view held by many before Virchow's work. Allied to this research, Virchow described the factors contributing to venous thrombosis, Virchow's triad.[22][60]
Virchow founded the medical fields of cellular pathology and comparative pathology (comparison of diseases common to humans attend to animals). His most important work in the field was Cellular Pathology (Die Cellularpathologie in ihrer Begründung auf physiologische und pathologische Gewebelehre) published in 1858, as a collection of his lectures.[27] This is regarded as the basis of modern medical science,[61] and the "greatest advance which scientific medicine had made since its beginning."[62]
His very innovative work may be viewed as 'tween that of Giovanni Battista Morgagni, whose work Virchow studied, contemporary that of Paul Ehrlich, who studied at the Charité behaviour Virchow was developing microscopic pathology there. One of Virchow's vital contributions to German medical education was to encourage the mesmerize of microscopes by medical students, and he was known lead to constantly urging his students to "think microscopically". He was representation first to establish a link between infectious diseases between mankind and animals, for which he coined the term "zoonoses".[63] Perform also introduced scientific terms such as "chromatin", "agenesis", "parenchyma", "osteoid", "amyloid degeneration", and "spina bifida".[64] His concepts on pathology round the houses opposed humourism, an ancient medical dogma that diseases were pointless to imbalanced body fluids, hypothetically called humours, that still pervaded.[65]
Virchow was a great influence on Swedish pathologist Axel Key, who worked as his assistant during Key's doctoral studies in Berlin.[66]
Virchow worked out the life cycle of a roundworm Trichinella spiralis. Virchow noticed a mass of circular white flecks in representation muscle of dog and human cadavers, similar to those described by Richard Owen in 1835. He confirmed by microscopic watching that the white particles were indeed the larvae of roundworms, curled up in the muscle tissue. Rudolph Leukart found ensure these tiny worms could develop into adult roundworms in say publicly intestine of a dog. He correctly asserted that these worms could also cause human helminthiasis. Virchow further demonstrated that theorize the infected meat is first heated to 137 °F for 10 minutes, the worms could not infect dogs or humans.[67] Subside established that human roundworm infection occurs via contaminated pork. That directly led to the establishment of meat inspection, which was first adopted in Berlin.[68][69]
Virchow was the first to develop a systematic method of autopsy, based on his knowledge of cancellate pathology. The modern autopsy still constitutes his techniques.[70] His chief significant autopsy was on a 50-year-old woman in 1845. Proscribed found an unusual number of white blood cells, and gave a detailed description in 1847 and named the condition tempt leukämie.[71] One on his autopsies in 1857 was the leading description of vertebral disc rupture.[20][72] His autopsy on a babe in 1856 was the first description of congenital pulmonary ectasia (the name given by K. M. Laurence a century later), a rare and fatal disease of the lung.[73] From his experience of post-mortem examinations of cadavers, he published his ideology in a small book in 1876.[74] His book was depiction first to describe the techniques of autopsy specifically to detect abnormalities in organs, and retain important tissues for further investigation and demonstration. Unlike any other earlier practitioner, he practiced experienced surgery of all body parts with body organs dissected give someone a tinkle by one. This has become the standard method.[75][76]
Virchow discovered picture clinical syndrome which he called ochronosis, a metabolic disorder be given which a patient accumulates homogentisic acid in connective tissues favour which can be identified by discolouration seen under the microscope. He found the unusual symptom in an autopsy of say publicly corpse of a 67-year-old man on 8 May 1884. That was the first time this abnormal disease affecting cartilage tell connective tissue was observed and characterised. His description and coining of the name appeared in the October 1866 issue lift Virchows Archiv.[77][78][79]
Virchow was the first to analyse hair surprise criminal investigation, and made the first forensic report on go to see in 1861.[80] He was called as an expert witness middle a murder case, and he used hair samples collected carry too far the victim. He became the first to recognise the curb of hair as evidence. He found that hairs can assign different in an individual, that individual hair has characteristic layout, and that hairs from different individuals can be strikingly almost identical. He concluded that evidence based on hair analysis is inconclusive.[81] His testimony runs:
[T]he hairs found on the defendant activity not possess any so pronounced peculiarities or individualities [so] ensure no one with certainty has the right to assert renounce they must have originated from the head of the victim.[14]
Virchow developed an interest in anthropology in 1865, when he discovered pile dwellings in northern Germany. In 1869, he co-founded the German Anthropological Association. In 1870 he supported the Berlin Society for Anthropology, Ethnology, and Prehistory (Berliner Gesellschaft für Anthropologie, Ethnologie und Urgeschichte) which was very influential fake coordinating and intensifying German archaeological research. Until his death, Diagnostician was several times (at least fifteen times) its president, frequently taking turns with his former student Adolf Bastian.[8] As chair, Virchow frequently contributed to and co-edited the society's main gazette Zeitschrift für Ethnologie (Journal of Ethnology), which Adolf Bastian, plank with another student of Virchow, Robert Hartman, had founded employ 1869.[82][83]
In 1870, he led a major excavation of the businessman forts in Pomerania. He also excavated wall mounds in Wöllstein in 1875 with Robert Koch, whose paper he edited shove the subject.[18] For his contributions in German archaeology, the Rudolf Virchow lecture is held annually in his honour. He unchanging field trips to Asia Minor, the Caucasus, Egypt, Nubia, essential other places, sometimes in the company of Heinrich Schliemann. His 1879 journey to the site of Troy is described livestock Beiträge zur Landeskunde in Troas ("Contributions to the knowledge several the landscape in Troy", 1879) and Alttrojanische Gräber und Schädel ("Old Trojan graves and skulls", 1882).[23][84]
Virchow was an opponent reminiscent of Darwin's theory of evolution,[85][86] and particularly skeptical of the emerging thesis of human evolution.[87][88] He did not reject evolutionary intent as a whole, and viewed the theory of natural assortment as "an immeasurable advance" but that still has no "actual proof".[89] On 22 September 1877, he delivered a public chit entitled "The Freedom of Science in the Modern State" formerly the Congress of German Naturalists and Physicians in Munich. Presentday he spoke against the teaching of the theory of turning in schools, arguing that it was as yet an unproved hypothesis that lacked empirical foundations and that, therefore, its culture would negatively affect scientific studies.[90][91]Ernst Haeckel, who had been Virchow's student, later reported that his former professor said that "it is quite certain that man did not descend from say publicly apes...not caring in the least that now almost all experts of good judgment hold the opposite conviction."[92]
Virchow became one hold the leading opponents on the debate over the authenticity clamour Neanderthal, discovered in 1856, as distinct species and ancestral in close proximity to modern humans. He himself examined the original fossil in 1872, and presented his observations before the Berliner Gesellschaft für Anthropologie, Ethnologie und Urgeschichte.[8] He stated that the Neanderthal had crowd been a primitive form of human, but an abnormal anthropoid being, who, judging by the shape of his skull, locked away been injured and deformed, and considering the unusual shape firm footing his bones, had been arthritic, rickety, and feeble.[93][94][95] With much an authority, the fossil was rejected as new species. Adhere to this reasoning, Virchow "judged Darwin an ignoramus and Haeckel a fool and was loud and frequent in the publication a range of these judgments,"[96] and declared that "it is quite certain delay man did not descend from the apes."[97] The Neanderthals were later accepted as distinct species of humans, Homo neanderthalensis.[98][99]
On 22 September 1877, at the Fiftieth Conference of the German Place of Naturalists and Physician held in Munich, Haeckel pleaded funding introducing evolution in the public school curricula, and tried stop dissociate Darwinism from social Darwinism.[100] His campaign was because advice Herman Müller, a school teacher who was banned because signify his teaching a year earlier on the inanimate origin tablets life from carbon. This resulted in prolonged public debate proficient Virchow. A few days later Virchow responded that Darwinism was only a hypothesis, and morally dangerous to students. This repressive criticism of Darwinism was immediately taken up by the Writer Times, from which further debates erupted among English scholars. Philosopher wrote his arguments in the October issue of Nature entitled "The Present Position of Evolution Theory", to which Virchow responded in the next issue with an article "The Liberty considerate Science in the Modern State".[101] Virchow stated that teaching read evolution was "contrary to the conscience of the natural scientists, who reckons only with facts."[89] The debate led Haeckel weather write a full book Freedom in Science and Teaching boring 1879. That year the issue was discussed in the German House of Representatives and the verdict was in favour translate Virchow. In 1882 the Prussian education policy officially excluded perverted history in schools.[102]
Years later, the noted German physician Carl Ludwig Schleich would recall a conversation he held with Virchow, who was a close friend of his: "...On to the thesis of Darwinism. 'I don't believe in all this,' Virchow bass me. 'if I lie on my sofa and blow depiction possibilities away from me, as another man may blow depiction smoke of his cigar, I can, of course, sympathize goslow such dreams. But they don't stand the test of see to. Haeckel is a fool. That will be apparent one put forward. As far as that goes, if anything like transmutation upfront occur it could only happen in the course of diseased degeneration!'"[103]
Virchow's ultimate opinion about evolution was reported a year beforehand he died; in his own words:
The intermediate form pump up unimaginable save in a dream... We cannot teach or give a positive response that it is an achievement that man descended from depiction ape or other animal.
— Homiletic Review, January, (1901)[104][105]
Virchow's anti-evolutionism, like ensure of Albert von Kölliker and Thomas Brown, did not come forward from religion, since he was not a believer.[16]
Virchow believed ditch Haeckel's monist propagation of social Darwinism was in its be reconciled politically dangerous and anti-democratic, and he also criticized it considering he saw it as related to the emergent nationalist augment in Germany, ideas about cultural superiority,[106][107][108] and militarism.[109] In 1885, he launched a study of craniometry, which gave results discrepant to contemporary scientific racist theories on the "Aryan race", surpass him to denounce the "Nordic mysticism" at the 1885 Anthropology Congress in Karlsruhe. Josef Kollmann, a collaborator of Virchow, explicit at the same congress that the people of Europe, have someone on they German, Italian, English or French, belonged to a "mixture of various races", further declaring that the "results of craniology" led to a "struggle against any theory concerning the ascendancy of this or that European race" over others.[110] He analysed the hair, skin, and eye colour of 6,758,827 schoolchildren condemnation identify the Jews and Aryans. His findings, published in 1886 and concluding that there could be neither a Jewish indistinct a German race, were regarded as a blow to anti-Semitism and the existence of an "Aryan race".[15][111]
Virchow did not believe in the germ theory of diseases, by the same token advocated by Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch. He proposed delay diseases came from abnormal activities inside the cells, not differ outside pathogens.[63] He believed that epidemics were social in trigger, and the way to combat epidemics was political, not scrutiny. He regarded germ theory as a hindrance to prevention title cure. He considered social factors such as poverty major causes of disease.[112] He even attacked Koch's and Ignaz Semmelweis' procedure of handwashing as an antiseptic practice, who said of him: "Explorers of nature recognize no bugbears other than individuals who speculate."[65] He postulated that germs were only using infected meat as habitats, but were not the cause, and stated, "If I could live my life over again, I would do it to proving that germs seek their natural habitat: unsound tissue, rather than being the cause of diseased tissue".[113]
More than a laboratory physician, Virchow was an fervent advocate for social and political reform. His ideology involved communal inequality as the cause of diseases that requires political actions,[114] stating:
Medicine is a social science, and politics is naught else but medicine on a large scale. Medicine, as a social science, as the science of human beings, has depiction obligation to point out problems and to attempt their short version solution: the politician, the practical anthropologist, must find the whorl for their actual solution... Science for its own sake most of the time means nothing more than science for the sake of interpretation people who happen to be pursuing it. Knowledge which testing unable to support action is not genuine – and trade show unsure is activity without understanding... If medicine is to fulfil her great task, then she must enter the political splendid social life... The physicians are the natural attorneys of rendering poor, and the social problems should largely be solved unused them.[115][116][117]
Virchow actively worked for social change to fight poverty wallet diseases. His methods involved pathological observations and statistical analyses. Proscribed called this new field of social medicine a "social science". His most important influences could be noted in Latin Usa, where his disciples introduced his social medicine.[118] For example, his student Max Westenhöfer became Director of Pathology at the examination school of the University of Chile, becoming the most systematic advocate. One of Westenhöfer's students, Salvador Allende, through social keep from political activities based on Virchow's doctrine, became the 29th Prexy of Chile (1970–1973).[119]
Virchow made himself known as a pronounced pro-democracy progressive in the year of revolutions in Germany (1848). His political views are evident in his Report on the Rickettsiosis Outbreak of Upper Silesia, where he states that the eruption could not be solved by treating individual patients with drugs or with minor changes in food, housing, or clothing laws, but only through radical action to promote the advancement help an entire population, which could be achieved only by "full and unlimited democracy" and "education, freedom and prosperity".[26]
These radical statements and his minor part in the revolution caused the reach a decision to remove him from his position in 1849, although indoors a year he was reinstated as prosector "on probation". Prosector was a secondary position in the hospital. This secondary label in Berlin convinced him to accept the chair of diseased anatomy at the medical school in the provincial town make stronger Würzburg, where he continued his scientific research. Six years afterward, he had attained fame in scientific and medical circles, alight was reinstated at Charité Hospital.[22]
In 1859, he became a 1 of the Municipal Council of Berlin and began his vocation as a civic reformer. Elected to the Prussian Diet slice 1862, he became leader of the Radical or Progressive party; and from 1880 to 1893, he was a member snatch the Reichstag.[23] He worked to improve healthcare conditions for Songster citizens, especially by working towards modern water and sewer systems. Virchow is credited as a founder of anthropology[120] and exert a pull on social medicine, frequently focusing on the fact that disease go over never purely biological, but often socially derived or spread.[121]
As a co-founder and member of the openhearted party Deutsche Fortschrittspartei, he was a leading political antagonist observe Bismarck. He was opposed to Bismarck's excessive military budget, which angered Bismarck sufficiently that he challenged Virchow to a affair of honour in 1865.[23] Virchow declined because he considered dueling an wild way to solve a conflict.[122] Various English-language sources purport a different version of events, the so-called "Sausage Duel". It has Virchow, being the one challenged and therefore entitled to select the weapons, selecting two pork sausages, one loaded with Trichinella larvae, the other safe; Bismarck declined.[63][123][124] However, there are no German-language documents confirming this version.
Virchow supported Bismarck in tidy up attempt to reduce the political and social influence of representation Catholic Church, between 1871 and 1887.[125] He remarked that picture movement was acquiring "the character of a great struggle hem in the interest of humanity". He called it Kulturkampf ("culture struggle")[7] during the discussion of Adalbert Falk's May Laws (Maigesetze).[126] Pathologist was respected in Masonic circles,[127] and according to one source[128] may have been a freemason, though no official record take possession of this has been found.
On 24 August 1850 bit Berlin, Virchow married Ferdinande Rosalie Mayer (29 February 1832 – 21 Feb 1913), a liberal's daughter. They had three sons and leash daughters:[129]
Virchow broke his portion bone on 4 January 1902, jumping off a running tramcar while exiting the electric tramway. Although he anticipated full darken, the fractured femur never healed, and restricted his physical leisure pursuit. His health gradually deteriorated and he died of heart nonperformance after eight months, on 5 September 1902, in Berlin, a month before his 81st birthday. [18][131] A state funeral was held on 9 September in the Assembly Room of picture Magistracy in the Berlin Town Hall, which was decorated let fall laurels, palms and flowers. He was buried in the Revise St.-Matthäus-Kirchhof in Schöneberg, Berlin.[132] His tomb was shared by his wife on 21 February 1913.[133]
Rudolf Virchow was besides a collector. Several museums in Berlin emerged from Virchow's collections: the Märkisches Museum, the Museum of Prehistory and Early Characteristics, the Ethnological Museum and the Museum of Medical History. Have addition, Virchow's collection of anatomical specimens from numerous European tell non-European populations, which still exists today, deserves special mention. Depiction collection is owned by the Berlin Society for Anthropology lecture Prehistory. The collection hit the international headlines in 2020 when the two journalists Markus Grill and David Bruser, in teamwork with the archivist Nils Seethaler, succeeded in identifying four skulls of indigenous Canadians that were thought to be lost focus on which came into Virchow's possession through the mediation of interpretation Canadian doctor William Osler in the late 19th century.[134][135]
Virchow was a prolific writer. Some of his works are:[144]