401 THE HISTORY OF BIOLOGY 



country shopkeeper, and after finishing school applied himself to medicine. 

 He was a pupil of J. Miiller and after completing his studies he became as- 

 sistant at the Charite Hospital in Berlin, rapidly acquiring a reputation on 

 account of his writings on pathology and his Archiv fur pathologische Anatomic 

 und Physiologie, which he founded in 1847 and edited until his death. He was 

 sent by the Government to be a medical officer in an industrial district in 

 Silesia, where a serious epidemic of typhus had broken out; in the report on 

 his mission he represented social distress in the district as being the true 

 cause of the disease in such terms as created resentment in high bureaucratic 

 circles. When, moreover, during the revolutionary year 1848 he joined the 

 opposition, he was dismissed from his post. He then moved to Wiirzburg, 

 where he became professor in pathological anatomy and developed such bril- 

 liant activities in the spheres of research and education that his school soon 

 rivalled that of his master, Miiller. The Prussian Government recalled him 

 in 1856, and from that date until shortly before his death he was one of the 

 most brilliant personalities at the University of Berlin. He died in 1902. as 

 the result of an accident. He remained throughout his life faithful to his 

 liberal ideas; as a member of the Prussian Diet and the German Parliament 

 he indefatigably supported the cause of liberalism and thereby came into 

 constant conflict with Bismarck and the adherents of that statesman. Vir- 

 chow naturally had no chance against such an antagonist, and his purely 

 political activities were unproductive. On the other hand, his influence on 

 the public health services in Germany was extraordinarily effective; it was 

 largely due to him that the German medical system became a model for 

 other countries. His energy sufficed for all claims made upon it, from the 

 reform of the sanitary system in Berlin to the organizing of the medical corps 

 during the War of 1870. Above all, however, the care of the sick in Berlin 

 stands as a monument to his organizing genius. 



Virchow' s cellular pathology 

 As a research-worker Virchow was really a pathologist; it was diseases and 

 their causes that was the chief object of his investigations. This led him 

 to the problem of the cells as fundamental constituents of the organism both 

 in health and sickness, and in the middle of the eighteen-fifties he laid the 

 foundations of his "cellular pathology": a theory of the cells as the true 

 causes of disease. When, therefore, a decade later, bacteriology began to 

 make headway, he refused to accept its results. An important work that he 

 published on tumours was never completed, and he subsequently devoted 

 himself, apart from politics, mostly to anthropology and archaeology. In 

 these spheres also he achieved much that is of value, not least on account 

 of his initiative — the great Museum fiir Volkerkunde in Berlin, for in- 

 stance, was founded by him — but this work is by no means to be compared 

 in importance with the products of his youth. 



