Today, we take it for granted that we’re made up of cells. But it was only in the mid nineteenth century that scientists really began to understand this. Two obstacles stood in the way of understanding. The first was simple observation: without microscopes, no one could even see cells. The second was the prevalence of a theory, or group of theories called Vitalism. Scientists believed that there was a distinct difference between organic matter and non-organic matter, and part of this difference was a kind of life energy. But that’s a cool dead theory for another post.
Because of the entrenchment of Vitalism, it was still over a hundred years after the first cells were seen through a microscope before anyone really understood that they were the basic building blocks of all life. Several scientists were involved. One of them was an interesting fellow named Rudolph Virchow.
Virchow was a physician and later an anthropologist. He was remarkable not only for his insistence that medicine be based on observation and experimentation, but also for being a revolutionary with strong ethical convictions.
Born in Germany on October 13, 1821, Virchow started out life as the only child of a farmer. Early on he showed a love for the natural sciences. Because of his aptitude he was given a fellowship which paid for him to attend medical school.
Self confident almost to a fault, he regularly challenged his teachers. At one point as a student, he conducted several experiments to disprove the theories of his professors that the causes of phlebitis (inflammation of the vein) were in the fluids rather than the vein walls (the cellular structure).
He received his medical degree from the University of Berlin in 1843. A few years later, he was sent to investigate a typhus outbreak in a poor province of Prussia. Instead coming back with a few medical guidelines, as had been expected, he insisted that the cure for such epidemics was the freedom of the people. The outbreaks weren’t just from poor hygiene, but were caused by the abject poverty and illiteracy which were caused by the economic and political subjugation of the people. Public health required “full and unrestrained” democracy, and everyone should have a constitutional right to health care.
His political activism got him booted as a faculty member at his medical school. Fortunately, this allowed him to spend more time in the laboratory. It was during this period that he studied cells. The fact that all living things were made of cells had already been established by Matthias Jakob Schleiden and Theodor Schwann. But these scientists still believed that cells might form by crystallizing or some other kind of precipitating process. As well, they faced a great deal of opposition from the vitalists. Once again, going against the norm, Virchow agreed with the observations of Schwann and Schleiden. But instead of a kind of spontaneous generation of cells, Virchow observed cells dividing under the microscope and developed the theory that all cells come from other living cells by cell division. He popularized the saying “Omnis cellula e cellula”. His focus on cells was in pathology on how they lead to disease.
He combined his love of science and medicine with his insistence one the standard of equality for all men his whole life. In his later years he joined the city council in Berlin, working with the government to improve public health. He was one of the first to put forth socioeconomic and political factors as the source for many predispositions for diseases. And when he later became interested in anthropology, what he did was to gather data which disproved the then popular notion that people of Aryan or Nordic descent were superior to others. He proclaimed that medicine was the highest form of human insight and the mother of all sciences. He died in 1902, after a life which moved medicine forward towards being evidence based and established a foundation for bioethics.
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