PROFESSOR RUDOLF VIRCHOW. 839 



is a simple lesion or a source of paralysis, the difference in results 

 being dependent upon a difference in the condition of different cells. 

 This difference in the condition of the cell forms its predisposition. 

 Previous to this, the old humoral theories which regarded the whole 

 compound mass had held more or less sway in medical practice, and 

 the recognition of diseases as local anomalies had made but slow prog- 

 ress. A few workers, from Yesal and Paracelsus down, had gradually 

 given shape to the local theory, and Virchow claimed that his cellular 

 pathology was a consistent carrying out of the principles they had 

 established. In it the localization of disease was taken as a necessity, 

 and its seat was fixed in the smallest composing element, or the cell. 

 Therapeutics have also undergone important changes in the light of 

 this theory, and under the guidance of experimental methods, and have 

 become vastly more exact and efficient, and local in application. Thus 

 far, Dr. Jacobi asserts, every new discovery of pathological facts has 

 found a ready explanation by the cellular theory and its methods. 

 " The changes worked in and by the white blood-cells, the transmuta- 

 tion of epithelial cells into benign results or malignant growths, the 

 influence, real or imaginary, worked by bacteria, have but strengthened 

 its plausibility." 



An antagonism to Virchow has apparently been assumed by some 

 of the partisans of the bacterial theory of infectious diseases which 

 has no real basis for existence. No discrepancy need exist between a 

 theory which regards disease as a disorder of the cells and the one 

 which finds in the bacteria an external agency provoking and promot- 

 ing cell-disorder. The publication of an essay on parasitic plants, in 

 the first volume of Virchow's " Pathology and Therapeutics," in 1854, 

 shows that his attention had been directed to the subject even then. 

 In 1856, also, a paper was published by him, in the " Archiv," on the 

 botanical nature and classification of some forms of parasites to which 

 an important part in nosology was to be attributed, on which occasion 

 he invented and first used the term " mycosis," which has since been 

 generally adopted. Brauell's papers on the bacterial parasite of an- 

 thrax, following up the researches of Davaine and Pollender, appeared 

 in the eleventh and fourteenth volumes of the " Archiv," and were 

 followed by numerous papers in that and other journals. Obermeier 

 found the spirochete in the blood of relapsing fever, in Virchow's 

 hospital division, in 1873. 



Virchow himself has said on this subject, in answer to an attack 

 by his former pupil Klebs : " Vegetable and animal parasites are 

 among the causes of disease. Their place is in etiology, and there- 

 fore it is easily conceived that, as Klebs expresses himself, they found 

 no place in my cellular pathology. There it was not any more my 

 domain to offer an extensive paper on parasites than it was to treat of 

 traumatic injuries and corrosions. In my cellular pathology I meant 

 to demonstrate the changes which take place in the elements of the 



