Rudolf Virchow: The Physician Who Declared the Cell as the Center of Life and Disease

On October thirteenth, eighteen twenty-one, Rudolf Ludwig Karl Virchow was born in Schivelbein, Prussia (now Świdwin, Poland). He was a physician, pathologist, anthropologist, and biologist, and his academic field was cellular pathology and social medicine.

Virchow's groundbreaking work forever changed the understanding of disease. Before his time, many believed that illness arose from imbalances in bodily fluids. Instead, Virchow proposed a radical new theory: cellular pathology. His famous aphorism, "omnis cellula e cellula" – "every cell stems from another [pre-existing] cell" – underpinned this. He argued that all diseases, including cancer, originate from disturbances in the body's normal cells, not from invisible fluids. This shifted medicine from a macroscopic to a microscopic level. He was the first to systematically describe leukemia and made crucial contributions to the understanding of thromboembolism. Outside the laboratory, Virchow was also a passionate advocate for public health and social reform, famously stating that "physicians are the natural attorneys of the poor."