Rudolf Virchow Quotes

23 Sourced Quotes

The body is a cell state in which every cell is a citizen. Disease is merely the conflict of the citizens of the state brought about by the action of external forces.

Rudolf Virchow
The task of science, therefore, is not to attack the objects of faith, but to establish the limits beyond which knowledge cannot go and found a unified self-consciousness within these limits.

Rudolf Virchow
Cellular pathology is not an end if one cannot see any alteration in the cell. Chemistry brings the clarification of living processes nearer than does anatomy. Each anatomical change must have been preceded by a chemical one.

Rudolf Virchow
Has not science the noble privilege of carrying on its controversies without personal quarrels.

Rudolf Virchow
Only those who regard healing as the ultimate goal of their efforts can, therefore, be designated as physicians.

Rudolf Virchow
Pathology also has its place in the science of biology, certainly a very honorable one, for to pathology we owe the realization that the contrast between health and disease is not to be sought in a fundamental difference of two kinds of life, nor in an alteration of essence, but only in an alteration of conditions.

Rudolf Virchow
Where a cell arises, there a cell must have previously existed (omnis cellula e cellula), just as an animal can spring only from an animal, a plant only from a plant.

Rudolf Virchow
The physicians surely are the natural advocates of the poor and the social problem largely falls within their scope.

Rudolf Virchow
No physiologist or practitioner ought ever to forget that medicine unites in itself all knowledge of the laws which apply to the body and the mind.

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

Rudolf Virchow
'Science in itself' is nothing, for it exists only in the human beings who are its bearers. 'Science for its own sake' usually means nothing more than science for the sake of the people who happen to be pursuing it.

Rudolf Virchow
Life thus forms a long, unbroken chain of generations, in which the child becomes the mother, and the effect becomes the cause.

Rudolf Virchow
There can be no scientific dispute with respect to faith, for science and faith exclude one another.

Rudolf Virchow
I definitely deny that any pathological process, i.e. any life-process taking place under unfavourable circumstances, is able to call forth qualitatively new formations lying beyond the customary range of forms characteristic of the species. All pathological formations are either degenerations, transformations, or repetitions of typical physiological structures.

Rudolf Virchow
Belief has no place as far as science reaches, and may be first permitted to take root where science stops.

Rudolf Virchow
There cannot be any issue between faith and science, for science and faith mutually exclude one another; not in the sense that the one renders the other impossible, or vice versa, but rather that so far as science extends faith does not exist, and faith begins where science leaves off. In Sir Richard Arman Gregory

Rudolf Virchow
I formulate the doctrine of pathological generation... in simple terms: omnis cellula e cellula

Rudolf Virchow
Medicine is a social science and politics is nothing but medicine on a large scale.

Rudolf Virchow
Practical medicine is never the same thing as scientific medicine but rather, even in the hands of the greatest master, an application of it.

Rudolf Virchow
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.

Rudolf Virchow
If we would serve science, we must extend her limits, not only as far as our own knowledge is concerned, but in the estimation of others.

Rudolf Virchow
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.

Rudolf Virchow
Between animal and human medicine, there is no dividing line—nor should there be.

Rudolf Virchow