Rudolf Virchow

“ There is a leisureliness about the seeming habit of existence on the Continent that does not pertain in America, and one felt the flavor of it quite as much in the presence of this great worker as among those people who from our stand-point seem never really to work at all. This is to a certain extent explained if one visited Virchow in his home, and found to his astonishment that the world-renowned physician, statesman, pathologist, anthropologist was domiciled in a little apartment of the most modest equipment, up two flights, in a house of most unpretentious character. ”

“ Henceforth there was a party in Berlin who were convinced that the growth, if growth it was, in the Crown Prince’s throat was benign. But it may serve as an illustration of the passions which the whole affair aroused when it is stated that there were many who asserted that Virchow had been deliberately deceived, and that the English specialist had refrained from submitting to him those portions of the membrane which would have clearly shown the presence of malignant disease. ”

“ With all these empty accusations, as with all the empty reproaches and groundless objections which Virchow brings against the doctrine of evolution, he takes good care in no way to touch the kernel of the matter. How, indeed, would it have been possible, without arriving at conclusions wholly opposed to those which he has declared? For the theory of descent proclaims, more clearly than any other scientific theory, that the equality of individuals which socialism strives after is an impossibility ”

“ One immediate result of his investigations, which appeared in a lecture at the Royal Institution (February 7, 1862) , "On the Fossil Remains of Man," was incorporated in "Man's Place in Nature." But a more important consequence of this impulse was that he went seriously into the study of Ethnology. Of his work in this branch of natural science, Professor Virchow, speaking at the dinner given him by the English medical profession on October 5, 1898, declared that in the eyes of German savants it alone would suffice to secure immortal reverence for his name. ”

“ The discovery made him famous, and from that day to this the name of Virchow has held somewhat the same position in the world of pathology that the name of Pasteur occupied in the realm of bacteriology. Virchow was called presently to a professorship in the University of Berlin. In connection with this chair he established his famous Institute of Pathology, which has been the Mecca of all students of pathology ever since. He did a host of other notable things as well, among others, entering the field of politics, and becoming a recognized leader there no less than in science. ”

“ No objections are listened to, no difficulties recognized, and a man like Virchow, himself the strongest supporter of evolution, who has the moral courage to say that the descent of man from any ape whatsoever is, as yet, before the tribunal of scientific zoölogy, “not proven,” is howled down in Germany in a manner worthy of Ephesians and Galatians. ”

“ Virchow lived on the same plane, generally speaking, with the other scientists of Europe; it is only from the American standpoint that there is any seeming disparity between his fame and his material station in life ”

“ There can be no question of his learning, and his dogmatism; but he gives me the solid feeling of a man honest like a great rock of black basalt—huge, hard, direct—one of those rare German types with eyes and hair blacker than a coal. His hand is broad, hard, warm always, and has something electrical in its grasp. I think I shall get fond of him, if he doesn’t talk Virchow to me. (For Virchow is my bête noir! I hate his name with unspeakable hatred.) At all events, to my great surprise, I find this grim dark German takes absolute pleasure in doing a kindness, and in speaking well of others. ”

“ But the great authority that Virchow had—an authority well founded in pathology and sociology—and his prestige as president of the German Anthropological Society, had the effect of preventing any member of the Society from raising serious opposition to him for thirty years. Numbers of journals and treatises repeated his dogmatic statement: "It is quite certain that man has descended neither from the ape nor from any other animal." ”

“ But it would have been strange if, in those years and in the middle of the whole scientific current of his time, his own organ, his icy logic, had not led him to the same conclusion; that it is a simpler method of research to believe in natural law alone, to regard the living merely as a complex play of the same forces that we have in physics and chemistry, and to consider man, with the bodily frame of an ape-like mammal, to be really such an animal. I believe, indeed, that Virchow never abandoned this simple solution in his own mind at any part of his career. ”

“ The scientific side, although there is enough of it to fill up an ordinary human life, is only one side of Professor Virchow's career. His life is equally full on the political and practical side. Since 1859 he has been an alderman of the city of Berlin, and has in that capacity given conscientious attention to the details of the government and wants of the municipality. ”

“ In the turmoil of the political and social struggle, even the most splendid civic crown will be dulled by the stifling dust of practical life, which never reaches the ethereal heights of pure science and never rests on the laurels of the thoughtful investigator. However, as I have said, that is a matter of taste. If Virchow really believes that he is doing a greater service to humanity by his practical [21] political life in Berlin than he formerly did by his theoretical scientific work in Würzburg, that is his affair ”

“ It needs hardly to be said that in his celebrated address, which has been received with such favor by the non-scientific portion of the public, and by such scientific persons as are dominated by traditional ideas, Virchow took the ground that evolution is an hypothesis not proved, and that therefore it should not be taught in the German schools; that the evidence of anthropology is thus far against the doctrine of the derivation of man from lower forms of life ”

“ He is the most brachycephalous type of man in Europe, perhaps in the world. [3] According to Virchow, the women in width of face are more Mongolian in type than the men, but neither in men nor women does the opening of the eye show any true obliquity. ”

“ Virchow's scientific work was singularly complete. He made numerous and exact observations and experiments; he deduced from them wide-reaching theories; he conducted an important journal for more than fifty years; he wrote text-books, summaries of scientific advance and books popularizing science; he established a school to which students came from all parts of the world, while at the same time taking part in the education of the people; he founded a great museum and took a leading part in scientific societies; he applied science directly to human welfare. ”

“ When, on the occasion of Virchow's eightieth birthday last year, Lord Lister brought greetings from Great Britain, he was the only man whose work could be placed beside Virchow's; but while his method of antiseptic treatment in surgery has been one of the greatest advances in medicine, it is in some respects an isolated discovery, and can scarcely claim equality with the immense work accomplished by Virchow and Pasteur. Lord Kelvin is the only living physicist who might be ranked with Helmholtz. Darwin has no peer. ”

“ If a distinguished man, be he never so remarkable for uncommon power of work and universal gifts, passes the whole day in the friction of political party-struggles, and throws himself as well into all the petty and wearisome details of daily civic life, it is impossible for him to maintain the requisite feeling for the progress of science—particularly when it advances so rapidly and incessantly as is the case in our day. It is therefore quite intelligible that Virchow should soon have lost this feeling, and in the course of the last two decades have become more and more estranged from science. ”

“ Oscar Schmidt might with justice retort, "If the socialists would think clearly they would feel that they must do all they can to choke the doctrine of descent, for it declares with express distinctness that socialist ideas are impracticable." And he proceeds to add, "And why has not Virchow made the gentle doctrines of Christianity responsible for the excesses of socialism? ”

“ In Germany, especially, the great majority of the members of the anthropological societies took up an attitude of hostility to him from the very beginning of the controversy in 1860. "The Descent of Man" was not merely rejected, but even the discussion of it was forbidden on the ground that it was "unscientific."
The centre of this inveterate hostility for thirty years—especially after 1877—was Rudolph Virchow of Berlin, the leading investigator in pathological anatomy, who did so much for the reform of medicine by his establishment of cellular pathology in 1858. ”

“ Darwin to the advancement of biological science, of which no one has expressed more admiration than himself. On the other hand, it seemed high time to him to enter an energetic protest against the attempts that are made to proclaim the problems of research as actual facts, and the opinions of scientists as established science. On the ground, among others, that it promotes the pernicious delusions of the socialists, Virchow considers the theory of evolution dangerous; but his fidelity to truth is so great that he would brave the danger and teach the theory, if it were only proved. ”

“ The most profound physicist of Europe, Professor Virchow, of Berlin, has lately asserted that this theory of man's evolution from the brute has no solid scientific foundation. Why need you and I seek to disprove what no man has ever yet proved or will prove? The other theory of man's origin comes down to us in the oldest book in existence, the Book of Job, and tallies exactly with the narrative in the next oldest books, those compiled by Moses: "The spirit of God hath made me, and the breath of the Almighty hath given me life." ”

“ Virchow, the greatest pathologist and one of the leading anthropologists of Germany, had much to do with the inspiring of Haeckel's Monistic views in the fifties. Like several other prominent German thinkers, Virchow subsequently abandoned the positive Monistic position for one of agnosticism and scepticism, and a long and bitter conflict ensued. It is hardly too much to say that Virchow's ultra-timid reserve in regard to the evolution of man and other questions has died with him. ”

“ They learn; that is the psychological expression of adaptation. The little work offers a suggestion of a psychology of Darwinism that may very well become the nucleus of the whole Darwinian structure in the twentieth century. But at the time it was quite obvious that a man with such ideas as these was breaking with lusty fist through the sacred net that spread before Virchow’s reserved province. The hour had come, therefore, for Virchow to feel that he must expel the idea of evolution from the whole field of science, and not merely from embryology and anthropology. ”

“ During the political chat he had been very quiet and calm, talking even about Bismarck in a rather subdued voice. But when I ventured to connect Anthropology and Criminology, barely mentioning Lombroso's name, it was as if some one had thrown a stone through the window. Virchow jumped up from his chair, and cried: "There you are on false ground. ”

“ With such tendencies predominant, how grotesque is the spectacle of a man like Virchow planting himself at the doors of the German schools, and flourishing his test of what is to be admitted there! As the scientific men approach with their subjects, they are stopped by the question, "Can you make oath, gentlemen, to the truth of what you offer?" And so we have a scientific man ruling out science from the schools by a standard not recognized in education, and which, if rigidly applied, would shut up every schoolhouse in Germany. ”

“ I suppose because I do not sufficiently sympathise with Socialists. All the greater is my regret that Professor Virchow did not himself unfold the links of the hidden bonds which unite evolution with revolution, and bind together the community of descent with the community of goods. ”

“ The theory that Virchow put before his pupils was pure Monism, or a unified conception of the world without any distinction of physical and metaphysical. Life was defined, not as a mystic eccentricity in an orderly nature, but plainly as a higher form of the great cosmic mechanism. Man, the object of medical science, was said to be merely a higher vertebrate, subject to the same laws as the rest. ”

“ Hence, too, Virchow can have no independent views as to the historical development of the higher from the lower animals, because the abundant living forms of the lower animals are almost unknown to him, and because he has hardly any conception of the marvellous strides which hundreds of industrious workers have made in this very department within the last twenty years. ”

“ But Virchow has the assurance to say to the assembled naturalists and physicians: "There is no doubt that, for us, mental phenomena pertain to certain animals, not to the totality of all organized beings, nor even to all animals ”

“ As to the Virchow business, I am beyond the years in which any one takes counsel in such matters from flesh and blood; if I set my life on any matter, I do it in the same faith in which I have, by long and severe strife, but in honest and humble prayer to God, strengthened myself, and in which no human words, even if spoken by a friend in the Lord and a servant of His Church, can alter me. ”