Rudolf Virchow Quotes

It is the curse of humanity that it learns to tolerate even the most horrible situations by habituation.

Medicine is a social science, and politics is nothing more than medicine on a large scale.

Medical education does not exist to provide student with a way of making a living, but to ensure the health of the community.

Medicine must go back to nature and a physician should be the high priest of nature.

The task of science is to stake out the limits of the knowable, and to center consciousness within them.

Belief begins where science leaves off and ends where science begins.

Laws should be made, not against quacks but against superstition.

So unstable are the most plausible theories in the light of objective, factual knowledge

True knowledge is to be aware of one’s ignorance. —Rudolf Virchow, letter to his father, ca. 1830s

Rudolf Virchow, Alt-48'er Steinewerfer und Pathologe, Schliemannbegleiter und Politiker, aber auch Robert Koch, der Erfinder von Cholera und Tuberkelose – die beiden muss man einfach persönlich kennen, wenn’s um die Charité geht.

The absence of proof does not constitute the proof of absence.

Jeder Fortschritt, den eine Kirche in dem Aufbau ihrer Dogmen macht, führt zu einer Bändigung des freien Geistes; jedes neue Dogma verengt den Kreis des freien Denkens. Die Naturwissenschaft umgekehrt befreit mit jedem Schritte ihrer Entwicklung. Sie gestattet dem Einzelnen in vollem Maße wahr zu sein.

True knowledge is to be aware of one's ignorance.

Medical statistics will be our standard of measurement: we will weigh life for life and see where the dead lie thicker, among the workers or among the privileged.

True knowledge is to be aware of one’s ignorance.—Rudolf Virchow, letter to his father, ca. 1830s

Ich konnte es begreifen, daß ein Chemiker in einem Gemälde von Michelangelo nur den Grund von Mauerkalk und die darauf gestrichene Ölfarbe, in einem Karton von Kaulbach nur Papier und Kreide sah; ich nahm es dem Mathematiker nicht übel, wenn er die Kuppel des römischen Pantheon nur als geometrische Figur betrachtete; ich verstand es, wenn der Physiker bei einer Symphonie von Beethoven an die Zahl der Schwingungen dachte, welche die verschiedenen Töne bemaß und bestimmte, oder wenn er das schöne Farbenspiel der Blumen ausschließlich nach den verschiedenen Strahlenbrechungen des Sonnenlichtes beurteilte. Ich hatte an sich gegen solche wissenschaftliche Betrachtung nichts als das einzuwenden, daß sie die Hauptsache nicht erkläre, daß sie nur untergeordnete Beziehungen aufdecke.

When reporting on epidemic diseases that primarily struck the poor in Upper Silesia in 1848, the famed German pathologist Rudolf Virchow observed: “it is the curse of humanity that it learns to tolerate even the most horrible situations by habituation, that it forgets the most shameful happenings in the daily shame of events.”82 The toleration of horrible situations that affect only the health of others is a phenomenon, sadly, that is still very much with us.

But venereal diseases, hepatitis, and diarrhea continued to ravage the French. In addition, recent evidence demonstrates that trench fever, a debilitating but rarely fatal disease borne by the same body lice that transmit typhus, also afflicted Napoleon’s troops. Thus multiple comorbidities compounded the misery of the retreating troops and compromised their resistance. Furthermore, typhus is well known to be especially lethal when it runs its course in populations that are undernourished. The nineteenth-century epidemiologist Rudolf Virchow reminds us that the disease fully earned yet another of its many nicknames—“famine fever.” The classic case is Ireland, where famine and typhus accompanied one another in successive crises between the end of the eighteenth century and the potato famine of 1846–1848.

When others lives were at stake, Virchow’s courage had no limit. That is the definition of a hero.

Medicine is a social science, and politics nothing but medicine on a grand scale.”