Virchow, RUDOLF

Virchow, RUDOLF, pathologist and publicist, was born 13th October 1821 at Schivelbein in Pomerania, studied at Berlin, and in 1843 became professor at the Charité there. In 1847 appointed a university lecturer, next year in the revolutionary fervour he got into disfavour, and was invited in 1849 to Würzburg as professor, but in 1856 returned to Berlin as professor and director of the pathological institute. He founded, edited, and contributed to several important medical journals, took part in numerous commissions, and speedily became one of the foremost pathologists in Europe, making very important contributions to many departments of pathological and physiological science. He rendered important services to archaeology and anthropology in connection with such subjects as lake-dwellings and cave-men, skulls from Trojan graves and Egyptian tombs; and as a politician has long been one of the most influential leaders of the advanced liberals of Prussia, where in 1862 he was first elected a member of the Prussian chamber. Of his innumerable works on medical and anthropological science Cellular Pathology as based on Histology (1850; 4th ed. 1871; Eng. trans. 1860) is the most famous. Others are Famine Fever (trans. 1868), Freedom of Science (trans. 1878), Infectious Diseases in the Army (1879), Post-mortem Examinations (trans. 1878), and treatises on trichiniasis, hygiene and sewerage, barracks, &c. He has exercised great and beneficent influence in the improvement of asylums and hospitals. See W. Becher, Rudolf Virchow (Berlin, 1891).