James Baquet

    The German doctor Rudolf Virchow (1821-1902) was the only child of working-class parents. He originally studied to be a minister, but his weak voice would have made preaching difficult, so he became a medical student, and a brilliant one at that.

    Of his more than 2,000 scientific pieces, the most famous, “Cellular Pathology” (1858), forms the basis of the modern study of pathology, the study of the causes and effects of disease.

    In this work, he popularized a famous phrase: “All cells come from cells.” This is part of “cell theory,” and does away with the idea of spontaneous generation, which proposed that life could come from inanimate objects, like frogs emerging from mud, or fly larvae developing from rotten meat.

    He also helped discredit the ancient system of humors, the idea that an imbalance of four liquids in the body could cause illness. He named and described numerous diseases, such as leukemia, as well as coining many scientific terms commonly used today. Over 15 eponymous medical terms include his name.

    Virchow famously opposed Darwin’s theory of evolution, calling Darwin an “ignoramus.” His own student Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919) was Germany’s leading supporter of Darwin. Virchow called him a “fool.”

    He was also wrong about the so-called “germ theory” proposed by Louis Pasteur and others, which declared that diseases were caused by microorganisms. Instead, he felt that all disease came from abnormal cell activities (which seems to be true for cancer). He felt that the spread of epidemics was a social, not a medical, problem, and that political solutions such as combating poverty, for example, would be more effective in curbing disease than any medical intervention — again inadvertently true, in part, as reducing poverty can improve hygiene, which reduces the spread of germs. In January 1902, he jumped from a streetcar and broke his leg. This limited his activity, and eight months later he died of heart failure.

    Vocabulary:

    Which word above means:

    1. take away people’s respect for something

    2. named after a particular person

    3. reducing or eliminating

    4. foolish person

    5. coming out of

    6. a kind of religious teaching technique

    7. practices that promote health, like washing hands after using the toilet

    8. lack of proper relationship between things

    9. not alive

    10. fighting against

    11. creating, saying something for the first time