Medicine and science in the 1860s : proceedings of the sixth British Congress on the History of Medicine, University of Sussex, 6-9 September 1967 / edited by F.N.L. Poynter.

  • British Congress on the History of Medicine
Date:
1968
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: Medicine and science in the 1860s : proceedings of the sixth British Congress on the History of Medicine, University of Sussex, 6-9 September 1967 / edited by F.N.L. Poynter. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    36/352 page 14
    nowledged guest of honour, sat on the right hand of the president, Professor Bouillaud. In England the merit of Virchow was formally recognized two years later by his election to honorary membership of the Pathological Society of London, along with Claude Bernard, Billroth, Helmholz and Ludwig. In the following year the peace of Europe was shattered and the French army was defeated at Sedan. This review of the rise of the concept of Cellular Pathology deals particularly with the period from 1847 until that time. the editorial pronouncement in 1855 Virchow was thirty-four years old when, in 1855, he formally expounded 1 his theory. The events of the abortive liberal uprising of 1848, in which he had been implicated and had courted the dis pleasure of his superiors, belonged to the past and since November 1849 he had been enjoying the busy and fruitful life of a university professor at 'about 2000 thalers [£300] a year' in the beautiful city of Würzburg, where Kölliker, a life-long friend, had settled two years before him. His own pupils included G. E. Rindfleisch, E. Krebs, W. His senior, V. Hensen, O. Deiters, A. Kussmaul, N. Friedreich and C. Gerhardt. The editorial columns of the Archiv für pathologische Anatomie und Physiologie und klinische Medizin which, with Reinhardt, he had been far-sighted enough to institute in 1847, provided a convenient medium through which he voiced periodic pronouncements on pathological topics: of these editorials the most important and far-reaching was this one which appeared in 1855. Three years earlier he had shaken the world of humoral patho logists and had stimulated microscopists, professional and amateur, by claiming 2,4 that pus cells were the product of continual tissue development and did not originate, as was the then current teaching, in an inflammatory exudate: they were in fact the end result of a process rather than its beginning. In a paper published 3 in that same year of 1852 he had asserted that those tiny elements, the cells, were the loci of life and also of disease. To his readers therefore, and to all who were privileged to hear him teach, his theory was no novelty and the dictum not unexpected. As will be seen later, others had been ventilating the same idea. This editorial began as a progress report wherein the editor claimed
    digitised image 1
    digitised image 2
    digitised image 3