Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 21.djvu/855

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PROFESSOR RUDOLF VIRCHOW.
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terests of the city of Berlin, and as a brave and outspoken parliamentary leader on the side of liberality and progress.

Professor Virchow was born at Schievelbein, in Pomerania, on the 13th of October, 1821. He studied medicine at the Frederick-Wilhelms Institute in Berlin, and was graduated in that faculty from the University of Berlin in 1843. He was made prosector of the Charité Hospital in 1846, and in the following year was appointed a regular lecturer in the university. In 1848 he was commissioned by the Government to visit Upper Silesia and study the typhus fever which was prevailing there as an epidemic, the result of misery and starvation. His report on this subject commanded attention at once, and is still held in high esteem by the medical profession and by all who are concerned with sanitary science.

To this period of Virchow's life belongs the establishment of the "Archiv für pathologische Anatomie und Physiologie und für Klinische Medicin," which was founded by Virchow and Reinhardt in 1848, and has been continued by Virchow since Reinhardt's death in 1852; and of the "Medical Reform," which he conducted in connection with Leubuscher in 1848 and 1849. The "Archiv" is still continued, under Virchow's direction, and is recognized as one of the chief and authoritative medical journals of the world. To this period belongs also his entrance into active political life on the awakening of his republican enthusiasm by the revolutionary movements of 1848 and 1849. He formed a democratic club, became a popular orator, and was elected to a seat in the National Assembly, to which, however, he was not admitted, because he had not yet reached the age of eligibility. The reaction came on, and Herr Virchow, whose participation in the revolutionary movement was not agreeable to the powers whom it displaced for a time, and who had the control of the public positions he held, was removed from his lectureship. He could not, however, stay dispossessed; the medical societies insisted upon his recall, and he was reinstated by the force of his obvious fitness for his position. He accepted an invitation to the chair of Pathological Anatomy at the University of Würzburg, and removed there. The Government, however, could not spare him from Berlin, and Herr Manteuffel called him back to his old chair in the university in 1856. He then became director of the newly founded Pathological Institute, and soon raised it to the first rank among such establishments, and made it a center of independent investigations for numerous young students. While at Würzburg he published his "Collection of Contributions to Scientific Medicine," of which the leading paper, on "The Movement in Favor of Unity in Scientific Medicine," which, previously published separately, had already attracted much attention from the scientific world, revealed the tendencies and direction of thought by which his subsequent career was to be determined. Professor Virchow's most distinguished services to science have been given in the