world, must be regarded as one of the most monotonously successful
chemical combinations on earth. All the chemical and pharmaceutical
advancements achieved since the modernization of medicine have not
changed the fact that the two chemicals in H&E staining are perhaps the
most reliable molecules in medicine, touching more lives over the last 150
years than almost any drug. The yin-yang of H&E staining meant that
various elements in tissue were reliably stained either pink or deep purple,
and researchers could now focus their eyes on the individual cells that
made up organs.
While the birth of industrial chemistry occurred in England, it rapidly
found a home in German academia, and the multiple scientific bastions
that would prop up medicine in the future—optics, pharmaceutics,
engineering, physiology, and radiology—co-evolved with decidedly
German sensibilities as well. The Italian leadership in medicine, most
recently championed by Morgagni, had resulted in a renaissance of French
medicine that turned physicians’ attention to the patient and her
symptoms. Viennese medicine was at the forefront of the birth of many
specialties in the mid–19th century, and Rokitansky, the last great naked-
eye pathologist, tutored many accomplished physicians around the globe.
But the Germans embraced all the new sciences with such gusto and with a
cultural alignment that made full adoption of the scientific leadership
mantle unquestioned. The title of ascendency among physicians in the
world would pass from Rokitansky to a maniacal worker and savant in
Berlin, a man who embraced the microscope, with its dyes and German-
made lenses (like Zeiss and Leica), and who established the concept of the
cellular basis of disease.
There has scarcely been a medical student and young physician who
labored harder than Rudolf Virchow. The eager young Virchow was born in
Pomerania in 1821 to a farmer and local treasurer and after graduating at
the head of his class in 1839 from the local secondary school, enrolled in
medical school in Berlin, in a military unit of the University of Berlin.
Here, at the Friedrich-Wilhelms Institut, Virchow was tutored by Johannes
Müller, “a biologist, comparative anatomist, biochemist, pathologist,
psychologist, and master teacher,” who trained generations of great
German physicians. Müller began his career as a physiologist, focusing on
nerve function, the mechanism of retina, and the functions of the sense
organs in the ear. As happens in science, the objects of interest become
marcin
(Marcin)
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