RUDOLF LUDWIG KARL 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

… 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

Medicine is a social science, and politics is nothing more than medicine on a grand scale.

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

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

Belief cannot be reckoned with in terms of science, for science and faith are mutually exclusive.

No doubt science cannot admit of compromises, and can only bring out the complete truth. Hence there must be controversy, and the strife may be, and sometimes must be, sharp. But must it even then be personal? Does it help science to attack the man as well as the statement? On the contrary, has not science the noble privilege of carrying on its controversies without personal quarrels?

The physicians are the natural attorneys of the poor, and the social problems should largely be solved by them.

Body: A cell state in which every cell is a citizen.

My politics were those of prophylaxis, my opponents preferred those of palliation.

It is the curse of humanity that it learns to tolerate even the most horrible situations by habituation.

'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.

If popular medicine gave the people wisdom as well as knowledge, it would be the best protection for scientific and well-trained physicians.

First, it must be a pleasure to study the human body the most miraculous masterpiece of nature and to learn about the smallest vessel and the smallest fiber. But second and most important, the medical profession gives the opportunity to alleviate the troubles of the body, to ease the pain, to console a person who is in distress, and to lighten the hour of death of many a sufferer.

Between animal and human medicine, there is no dividing line-nor should there be.

It is the curse of humanity that it learns to tolerate even the most horrible situations by habituation, that it forgets the most shameful happenings in the daily shame of events, and that it can hardly understand when individuals aim to destroy this infamy.

Marriages are not normally made to avoid having children.

Medical education does not exist to provide students with a way of making a living, but to ensure the health of the community.

Medicine is a social science, and politics is nothing else but medicine on a large scale. Medicine, as a social science, as the science of human beings, has the obligation to point out problems and to attempt their theoretical solution: the politician, the practical anthropologist, must find the means for their actual solution. The physicians are the natural attorneys of the poor, and social problems fall to a large extent within their jurisdiction.

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.

Brevity in writing is the best insurance for its perusal.

Laws should be made, not against quacks but against superstition.

As long as vitalism and spiritualism are open questions so long will the gateway of science be open to mysticism.

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

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