- Rudolf Virchow was a German physician known as the "father of modern pathology" for bringing more science to medicine and discrediting humorism. He established the importance of cellular pathology and that diseases have physical, not supernatural, causes. - He was a prolific writer and scientist who founded important journals, described and named many diseases, and established meat inspection and autopsy practices. However, he opposed Darwinian evolution and the concept of races. - Virchow had a brilliant academic career, receiving honors from scientific institutions while also engaging in politics and social reform through his "medicine is a social science" view. He made many contributions to establishing modern medical science.

1. Rudolf Virchow
Rudolf Ludwig Carl Virchow was a German physician, anthropologist, pathologist,
prehistorian, biologist, writer, editor, and politician, known for his advancement of public
health. He is known as "the father of modern pathology" because his work helped to discredit
humourism, bringing more science to medicine. He is also known as the founder of social
medicine and veterinary pathology, and to his colleagues, the "Pope of medicine
Born and lived in Schievelbein as an only child of a working-class family, he proved to be a
brilliant student. Dissuaded by his weak voice, he abandoned his initial interest in theology
and turned to medicine. With special military scholarship, he earned his medical degree from
Friedrich-Wilhelms Institute (Humboldt University of Berlin) under the tutelage of Johannes
Peter Müller. He worked at the Charité hospital under Robert Froriep, whom he eventually
succeeded as the prosector.[8]
Although he failed to contain the 1847–1848 typhus epidemic in Upper Silesia, his report laid
the foundation for public health in Germany, as well as his political and social activities.
From it, he coined a well known aphorism: "Medicine is a social science, and politics is
nothing else but medicine on a large scale". He participated in the Revolution of 1848, which
led to his expulsion from Charité the next year. He published a newspaper Die medicinische
Reform (Medical Reform) during this period to disseminate his social and political ideas. He
took the first Chair of Pathological Anatomy at the University of Würzburg in 1849. After
five years, Charité invited him back to direct its newly built Institute for Pathology, and
simultaneously becoming the first Chair of Pathological Anatomy and Physiology at Berlin
University. The campus of Charité is now named Campus Virchow Klinikum. He cofounded
the political party Deutsche Fortschrittspartei, by which he was elected to the Prussian House
of Representatives, and won a seat in the Reichstag. His opposition to Otto von Bismarck's
financial policy resulted in an anecdotal "Sausage Duel" between the two. But he ardently
supported Bismarck in his anti-Catholic campaigns, the social revolution he himself named as
Kulturkampf ("culture struggle")
A prolific writer, his scientific writings alone exceeded 2,000 in number. Among his books,
Cellular Pathology published in 1858 is regarded as the root of modern pathology. This work
also popularised the third dictum in cell theory: Omnis cellula e cellula ("All cells come from
cells"); although his idea originated in 1855.[11] He founded journals such as Archiv für

2. pathologische Anatomie und Physiologie und für klinische Medizin (now Virchows Archiv),
and Zeitschrift für Ethnologie (Journal of Ethnology). The latter is published by German
Anthropological Association and the Berlin Society for Anthropology, Ethnology and
Prehistory, the societies of which he also founded.
Virchow was the first to precisely describe and give names of diseases such as leukemia,
chordoma, ochronosis, embolism, and thrombosis. He coined scientific terms, chromatin,
agenesis, parenchyma, osteoid, amyloid degeneration, and spina bifida. His description of the
transmission cycle of a roundworm Trichinella spiralis established the importance of meat
inspection, which was started in Berlin. He developed the first systematic method of autopsy
involving surgery of all body parts and microscopic examination. A number of medical terms
are named after him, including Virchow's node, Virchow–Robin spaces, Virchow–Seckel
syndrome, and Virchow's triad. He was the first to use hair analysis in criminal investigation,
and recognised its limitations. His laborious analyses of the hair, skin, and eye colour of
school children made him criticise the Aryan race concept as a myth.
He was an ardent anti-evolutionist. He referred to Charles Darwin as an "ignoramus" and his
own student Ernst Haeckel, the leading advocate of Darwinism in Germany, as a "fool". He
discredited the original specimen of Neanderthal man as nothing but that of a deformed
human, and not an ancestral species.[16] He was an agnostic.
In 1861, he was elected a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. In
1892, he was awarded the Copley Medal of the British Royal Society. He was elected to the
Prussian Academy of Sciences in 1873, and entitled an ennoblement "von Virchow", but
which he declined.

3. Life and scientific career
Young Virchow
Virchow was born in Schievelbein in eastern Pomerania, Prussia (now Świdwin in
Poland).[18] 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 in his classes and was fluent in German, Latin,
Greek, Hebrew, English, Arabic, French, Italian, and Dutch. He studied theology in
gymnasium in Koslinka in 1835, from where he graduated in 1839 upon a thesis titled A Life
Full of Work and Toil is not a Burden but a Benediction. However, he chose to take up
medicine mainly because he considered his voice too weak for preaching.
In 1839, he received a military fellowship (a scholarship for gifted children from poor family
to become army surgeon), for studying medicine at Friedrich-Wilhelms Institute in Berlin
(now Humboldt University of Berlin). He was most influenced by Johannes Peter Müller. He
defended his thesis titled de rheumate praesertim corneae (corneal manifestations of
rheumatic disease) for medical degree on 21 October 1843, with Müller as his doctoral
advisor.[20] Immediately on graduation he became subordinate physician to Müller. But
shortly after, he joined the Charité Hospital in Berlin for internship. In 1844, he was
appointed as medical assistant to the prosector (pathologist) Robert Froriep, from whom he
learned microscopy for his interest in pathology. Froriep was also the editor of an abstract
journal that specialised in foreign work, allowing Virchow to be exposed to the more
forward-looking scientific ideas of France and England.
Virchow published his first scientific paper in 1845 in which he wrote the earliest known
pathological descriptions of leukemia. He qualified the medical licensure examination in

4. 1846, and immediately succeeded Froriep as hospital prosector at the Charité. In 1847, he
was appointed to his first academic position with the rank of privatdozent. Because his
writings were not receiving favourable attention by German editors, with colleague Benno
Reinhardt he founded Archiv für pathologische Anatomie und Physiologie und für klinische
Medizin (now known as Virchows Archiv) in 1847. He edited alone from Reinhardt's death
in 1852 until his own. This journal began publishing high-level contributions based on the
criterion that no papers would be published which contained outdated, untested, dogmatic or
speculative ideas. Unlike his German peers, Virchow had great faith in clinical observation,
animal experimentation (to determine causes of diseases and the effects of drugs) and
pathological anatomy, particularly at the microscopic level, as the basic principles of
investigation in medical sciences. He went further and stated that the cell was the basic unit
of the body that had to be studied to understand disease. Although the term 'cell' had been
coined in the 1665 by an English scientist Robert Hooke, the building blocks of life were still
considered to be the 21 tissues of Bichat, a concept described by the French physician Marie
Bichat.