From Japan, America, Russia and all of Europe, the medical and research elite flocked to Berlin in autumn 1901 to “lay their wreaths at the feet of the great pathologist”.
The celebrations for Rudolf Virchow's 80th birthday on October 13 lasted for several days: an overwhelming, never-to-be-forgotten spectacle with hundreds of guests, full of glamor and glitter, impressions like from a kaleidoscope, as Sir Felix Semon later describes in the British Medical Journal ".
Medical professionals even held birthday parties in distant lands.
“How much must this man have done,” writes Semon, “so that the whole world would unite to do him honor!”
Johanna Kuroczik
Editor in the "Science" section of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung.
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The indeed great achievement of Rudolf Virchow is that he set the course for modern medicine. To this day, 200 years after his birth, Virchow is omnipresent at the Berlin Charité, his medical home. Clinics, institutes and museums mark his legacy. Doctors and scientists are seldom aware that his work still has a more subtle effect - how Virchow shapes her everyday life and her self-image as a natural scientist. Virchow was basically the prototype of the modern explorer.
Even in the 19th century, times were gloomy in Germany in terms of health, people died of infectious diseases such as tuberculosis, typhus or cholera. Those who could afford it received treatment at home. Only poor people went to hospital and, if anything, only rest and care improved their condition. The doctors weren't much help. They faithfully followed the teachings of humoral pathology, the four humours doctrine, devised by Hippocrates in ancient Greece. According to this, all diseases stem from "dyscrasias", imbalances in the body fluids, and blood, phlegm, yellow and black bile had to be balanced accordingly: doctors therefore drained the sick by the gallon of blood and distributed emetics. Virchow thought little of that: "You were all the more completely satisfied with your healing successes,when the humorous theory, believed and preached in the most beautiful harmony by laypeople and scholars, also made the failures easily explainable. "
From the origin of the human cell
When Virchow took up the recently created chair for pathology at the University of Würzburg in 1849, he was still convinced that cells were created from an "amorphous" mass. In the seven fertile years before his return to the Charité in 1856, he devoted himself to researching cells. He based his studies on pathology and anatomy, experimenting on animals, and dissecting corpses. He mastered the scientific microscope masterfully, so that bones, cartilage and blood could be examined closely: "Under the microscope of the biologist everything that is alive dissolves into small elements." In 1855 his revolutionary work "Cellular Pathology" appeared. Virchow was not the first to think that cells were derived from other cells, but he bundled and completed the knowledge:Every cell comes from a cell, and every human being consists of a cell state in which the cells are differently gifted but of equal value, he sums it up. “The cell as the last active element of the living body” is also the origin of diseases. “Science marches in cohorts,” explains historian Constantin Goschler, who deals with this in his book “Rudolf Virchow: Medic, Anthropologist, Politician”. "It was only during this time that people understood what diseases are, and Virchow played a key role in this."“Science marches in cohorts,” explains historian Constantin Goschler, who deals with this in his book “Rudolf Virchow: Medic, Anthropologist, Politician”. "It was only during this time that people understood what diseases are, and Virchow played a key role in this."“Science marches in cohorts,” explains historian Constantin Goschler, who deals with this in his book “Rudolf Virchow: Medic, Anthropologist, Politician”. "It was only during this time that people understood what diseases are, and Virchow played a key role in this."