Rudolf Virchow

Rudolf Ludwig Karl Virchow (October 13, 1821 – September 5, 1902) was a German doctor, anthropologist, public health activist, pathologist, prehistorian, biologist and politician.

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• For if medicine is really to accomplish its great task, it must intervene in political and social life. It must point out the hindrances that impede the normal social functioning of vital processes, and effect their removal.
  • 1849 (quoted in Pathologies of Power, by Paul Farmer, page 323)

• 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.
  • 1848 (quoted in Infections and Inequalities by Paul Farmer, page 1

• Omnis cellula e cellula
  • Every cell from a cell

• "Between animal and human medicine, there is no dividing line—nor should there be."
  • 1856 (Quoted in: Klauder JV: Interrelations of human and veterinary medicine. N Engl J Med 1958, 258:170-177)

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