Rudolf Virchow

Rudolf Virchow studied medicine in Berlin under Johannes Peter Müller, and while working at Charité hospital investigated the 1847-1848 typhus epidemic in Upper Silesia - work that became the foundation for public health in Germany and led him to declare that "medicine is a social science, and politics is nothing else but medicine on a large scale." His role in the Revolution of 1848 got him expelled from Charité; he spent seven years at Würzburg before the hospital brought him back to lead a new pathology institute in 1856. Over 2,000 scientific writings followed, including Cellular Pathology in 1858, and he named diseases from leukemia to thrombosis, coined terms like "neuroglia" and "amyloid degeneration", pioneered systematic autopsy, and brought hair analysis into forensic work. He co-founded political parties, sat in the Prussian parliament and the Reichstag, backed Bismarck's Kulturkampf against the Catholic Church, and spent his final decades rejecting germ theory, dismissing Darwin, and insisting the first Neanderthal skull belonged to a deformed human. His colleagues called him the Pope of medicine.