Rudolf Virchow

Sent by the Prussian government to investigate the typhus epidemic in Upper Silesia in 1847–1848, Virchow reported that the disease could not be cured with drugs but only by removing poverty and lack of rights; his saying that medicine is a social science and politics nothing but medicine on a large scale comes from this. He took part in the Berlin revolution of March 1848 and published the weekly Medical Reform, and in 1849 was dismissed from the Charité.

After seven years at Würzburg he returned to Berlin in 1856 to head Germany’s first institute of pathology. Arguing that every cell arises from another cell, he displaced the old doctrine that explained disease by an imbalance of the humours and made the cell the unit of disease. He remained sceptical to the end, however, of Semmelweis’s findings on puerperal fever, of Koch’s bacteriology and of Haeckel’s Darwinism.

In 1861 Virchow co-founded the liberal German Progress Party and the next year entered the Prussian House of Representatives, where the party held the majority until 1866. During the constitutional conflict he opposed Bismarck’s military budget, and in 1865 Bismarck challenged him to a duel, which he refused as an uncivilised way to settle a dispute. In 1869 he moved for cuts in the military spending of the North German Confederation, international arbitration and a United States of Europe.

In 1873, however, he backed Bismarck’s campaign to curb the influence of the Catholic Church and called it a Kulturkampf, the name it has kept. He sat in the Reichstag from 1880 to 1893, from 1884 in the German Free-minded Party’s group. He opposed antisemitism and colonial policy and defended the rights of minorities such as the Poles of Prussia.

Karl Heinrich Ulrichs printed among the authoritative testimonies of Memnon (1868), §45, the letter Virchow wrote him on 19 August 1864 after reading Inclusa: Virchow had nothing to object to the account of a female mind in a male body and called it an exceedingly important subject. In the very next section, §46, however, Ulrichs attacked Virchow for acknowledging that Uranism was inborn while still declaring criminal penalties the best means of meeting it, an example of a persecuting zeal “imbibed with the mother’s milk”, and at the end of the book he called for the struggle “in spite of all the Schwarzes, Virchows and Migaults”. The following year, 1869, Virchow came out in favour of decriminalising sexual acts between men.