Festvortrag:

Abstract

The German physician Rudolf Virchow (1821-1902) is world-famous not only due to the fact that he was the most distinguished chairman in Pathological Anatomy, a new discipline at the German Medical Schools in the second half of 19th century. Virchow became well-known also by his further activities, especially his endeavours for reforming medicine on a scientific basis and his political commitment to healthcare and social politics. As a member of the liberal party Deutsche Fortschrittspartei he became a representative of the Prussian State Parliament Landtag and of the German Federal Parliament Reichstag. As a gifted author and as an untiring editor he founded and ran two different journals: In 1848/49 he published the weekly paper The Medical Reform in which he gave his support to a scientific reform of medicine and to a democratic change in society, writing that politics were „nothing else but medicine in the broader perspective". In 1847 he founded the Archives for Pathological Anatomy and Physiology and for Clinical Medicine which is published yet today under the name of Virchow Archiv. In this journal many different schools of scientific medicine were invited to publish the results of their research. Occasionally, Virchow himself wrote articles on medical epistemology or on social politics. When he died in 1902, Rudolf Virchow had edited 169 volumes of his journal.