increasingly small, and Müller’s early subject matter was at the extreme
boundaries of plain-vision investigation.
Müller had legendary energy (perhaps suffering from bipolar disorder,
exhibiting bouts of mania and, alternately, severe, incapacitating
depression^16 ) and tended to attract like-minded and similarly indefatigable
pupils. An early student was Theodor Schwann (1810–1882), who became
the principal advocate of the cell theory newly proposed by his botanist
friend Matthias Jacob Schleiden (1804–1881). Together, the works of
Schleiden and Schwann in the years 1838 and 1839 set a firm foundation
for the new appreciation of the importance of cells in plants and animals,
explaining how they grow, function, and interact. Chemistry had the
atomic theory; biology now had the cell theory.
Müller rapidly turned to the microscope in 1838, and soon was
examining the cellular structure of tumors microscopically. Into this
torrent of activity and revolutionary upheaval in 1839 strode the new
medical student Rudolf Virchow. It was like two supernovae colliding, and
the explosion of insight and output is almost unrivaled in scientific
history.
Rudolf Virchow was incredibly intelligent and monstrously energetic.
He was fluent in many European languages, and had learned Greek, Latin,
Hebrew, and Arabic. Besides his multilingualism, he was an ardent
archeology, ethnology, and political science devotee. At age twenty, he
wrote his father from Berlin that his aim was to acquire “no less than a
universal knowledge of nature from the God-head down to the stone.” The
brash and ultra-confident German, short and thin with bespectacled dark
eyes and a piercing owl’s gaze, wrote shortly before medical school
graduation, “... you misunderstand me if you think my pride is based on
my knowledge, the incompleteness of which I can see best: it is based on
the consciousness that I want something better and greater, that I feel a
more earnest striving for intellectual development than most other
people.”^17
Virchow graduated medical school in 1843, initially working at Berlin’s
Charité Hospital, associating himself with the pathologist Robert Froriep.
Within two years of graduation, in 1845, Virchow published a case report
of a cook in her mid-fifties who had died in Berlin from an unknown
disease. At autopsy, the blood in her organs contained a thick, milky layer,
floating like a waxy blob. At first glance, it must have appeared like pus to