Rudolf Virchow - Political Career

Political Career

More than a laboratory physician, Virchow was an impassioned advocate for social and political reform, stating:

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.

Virchow made himself known as a pronounced democrat in the year of revolutions in Germany (1848). Earlier the same year, the government-employed doctor Virchow was asked to investigate an epidemic of typhus in the poverty-stricken area of Upper Silesia by the Prussian government. His political views are evident in his Report on the Typhus Outbreak of Upper Silesia (1848), where he states the outbreak could not be solved by treating individual patients with drugs or with minor changes in food, housing, or clothing laws, but only through radical action to promote the advancement of an entire population, which could only be achieved by "full and unlimited democracy" and "education, freedom and prosperity".

These radical statements and minor part in the revolution caused the government to remove him (1849) from his position, although within a year was reinstated as prosector 'on probation'. Prosector was a secondary position in the hospital. This secondary position in Berlin convinced him to accept the chair of pathological anatomy at the medical school in the provincial Würzburg, where he was continued his scientific research. Six years later, he had attained fame at scientific and medical circles, and was reinstated at Charité Hospital.

In 1859, he became a member of the Municipal Council of Berlin and began his career as a civic reformer. Elected to the Prussian Diet in 1862, he became leader of the Radical or Progressive party; and from 1880 to 1893, he was a member of the Reichstag. He worked to improve the health-care conditions for the Berlin citizens, namely working towards modern water and sewer systems. Virchow is also credited with the founding of social medicine, frequently focusing on the fact that disease is never purely biological, but often socially derived or spread, and anthropology.