On this day in 1858, the Berlin publishing house of August Hirschwald released the foundational work Cellular Pathology by esteemed physician, sociologist and anthropologist Rudolf Ludwig Carl Virchow, which informed modern medical thought. Not only recognising the mechanisms behind disease, injury and healing broadly, Virchow was the first to describe and name ailments and disorders, including coining terms like leukaemia, thrombosis and spina bifida and helped to formalise the practise of autopsy and forensics. Drawing on his interest in ethnography and archeology (accompanying Heinrich Schliemann during some of his Trojan expeditions) and adopting it into his medical research, while teaching at the University of Wรผrzburg, Virchow coined the maxim that medicine “is a social science, and politics is nothing more than medicine on a large scale,” pioneering public health campaigns to counter outbreaks, and perhaps aligned with this guiding aphorism rejected the germ theory of infections (believing that they were symptoms rather than causes and that poverty was the biggest cause of sickness and death—although contributing a lot to the study of macroscopic parasites) and adamantly disagreed with Darwinian evolution—recognising natural selection but rejecting the emergent theory as flawed—see the above teaching tenure. Also opposing the social Darwinism ideas of his student Ernst Haeckel as dangerous propaganda, Virchow—for all his drive to classify and categorise—went against popular contemporary thinking by declaring race to be a social construct and thus denying anyone their designs of primacy through a large-scale study of ethnic communities across Europe and beyond.
synchronoptica
one year ago: Wattstax (with synchronoptica), assorted links to revisit plus the first school strike for the climate
seven years ago: the first FedEx delivery van, Total Eclipse of the Heart plus grace and favour appointments
eight years ago: an exoplanet in the Goldilocks Zone, Team Refugee to get its own Olympic flag plus trying to sprout Indian Bean Trees
nine years ago: an antique look at four-dimensional space
ten years ago: disruptive natural and unnatural disasters, Netpolitiks plus Gaulish conquests