RESEARCH IN MEDICINE 557 



new, it is often only necessary to go back to the work of Eokitansky to 

 find that he had observed and accurately described it." (Councilman.) 

 Although he encouraged the development of pathological histology, 

 pathological chemistry and experimental pathology, he took no active 

 part in these subdivisions of pathology and used the microscope but 

 little. He seems to have been content with the establishment of patho- 

 logical anatomy as a descriptive science. 



Between Eokitansky's work and Virchow's cell theory there is no 

 obvious connection. Between Morgagni, Bichat and Virchow we have 

 an interesting link, that formed by the successive theories which placed 

 disease in the organs, the tissues and the cell, respectively. Eokitansky 

 worked with the organs and tissue and had no influence in carrying the 

 quest on to the cell. The influences which led Virchow to the latter are 

 wholly those we have discussed in the story of physiology and its begin- 

 nings, the personal influence of Johannes Miiller, Schwann's writings 

 and the results of the application to medicine of the methods of physics 

 and chemistry. That he appreciated the importance of the relations 

 of pathology, on the one hand, to physiology, and on the other to clinical 

 medicine is shown in the title of his Archives established in 1847. It is 

 not surprising, therefore, that he was not satisfied with the pathology as 

 merely the descriptive and classifying science of Eokitansky and that he 

 was the first to recognize that pathology was the study of life under 

 abnormal circumstances, and that chemistry, physiology and embry- 

 ology had a direct bearing on pathology and that the methods of all 

 the other natural sciences should be applied to the elucidation of the 

 problems of pathology and thus to those of medicine. 



Virchow's " cellular pathology," as announced in its final form in 

 1858, must be considered as a general biological principle as important 

 in the field of its application as Darwin's " Origin of Species " pub- 

 lished one year later. 



It is said that Virchow first began the observations which culmi- 

 nated in his doctrine of cellular pathology in his student days, while 

 serving as an assistant in the eye clinic of the Berlin Hospital. Here 

 he became interested in the fact that in keratitis and wounds of the 

 cornea healing took place without the appearance of plastic exudate. 

 This led to an investigation which indicated the occurrence of repair 

 by the multiplication of preexistmg cells. These studies led eventually 

 to his theory, which Lord Lister has described as the " true and fertile 

 doctrine that every morbid structure consists of cells which have been 

 derived from preexisting cells as a progeny." In this theory he brought 

 pathological processes into relation with normal growth, hence his 

 axiom " omnis cellula e cellula." This was the underlying principle, 

 which, following Eokitansky's work in classification, gave pathology a 

 place among the biological sciences. With his cell doctrine as a guide 

 he made many important contributions to histology both normal and 



