Rudolf Virchow: Sämtliche Werke

Rudolf Virchow is one of the most important physicians of the modern age, who placed the whole of modern medicine on a new foundation. The terminology he introduced is in large part still internationally binding. His philological and terminological processes, how he created new terms, and how their meaning changed within a specified time, are all made clear in the transcript by the Freiburg student Gustav Schmid of Virchow’s lecture on “General Pathological Anatomy” given in Würzburg in the summer semester of 1854 and preserved today in Karlsruhe. Published here in book form or the first time it documents an important step on the path towards his cellular pathology. Since Virchow himself never wrote a textbook of pathology, very few printed sources exist which illustrate the progress of research in his time. They have all been published for the first time in the complete edition of Virchow’s works. As the editor documents this, we often find Virchow’s very comprehensively presented views on fundamental philosophical problems of the age and of medicine, e.g. which processes in the human body should be understood as pathological, and what happens in these during and after death.