the twenty-four-year-old physician, but unlike John Hughes Bennett, the
Scottish physician who first described the disease four months before
Virchow, Virchow did not declare it a “suppuration of blood,” or an
infection. Smearing the blood on a microscope slide, utilizing the
primitive carmine dye to stain the cells, and carefully observing the
constituents of the fluid, Virchow was at a loss to explain the phenomenon
of the hordes of large round cells (interspersed among the small red blood
cells) he was observing, and decided upon simply describing the disease
by its visual appearance: weisses Blut (white blood). In a subsequent 1856
publication, Virchow adopted the Greek term for white blood, leukemia,
including the description of two forms of the disease, one in which the
spleen is enlarged and the other in which the lymph nodes are infiltrated
by the white blood cells.
Virchow published another article in 1846 on the nature of blood clots,
proposing theories about the genesis of deep venous thrombosis (large
blood clots) and emboli (traveling blood clots) that have proven true all
these years later. The twenty-five-year-old decrypted the enigma of
embolism, where a large blood clot detaches from a leg or arm vein and
travels to the lungs, where it completely obstructs blood flow and causes
catastrophic death, a concept no one had ever considered. In the space of a
year, Virchow had correctly identified (and even postulated the cause of)
two major diseases that had plagued mankind forever. Bolstered by his
success, Virchow decided to publish a journal, The Archive of Pathological
Anatomy and Physiology, and Clinical Medicine. It is still published to this
day, as one of the most important journals in the world; it is simply
referred to as Virchows Archiv.
In the first issue, Virchow outlined his scientific world view in a tour de
force statement. He declared, “Pathologic anatomy is the doctrine of
deranged structure; pathologic physiology is the doctrine of deranged
function ... [t]he science of pathologic physiology will then gradually
fulfill its promise, not as a creation of a few overheated heads, but from
the cooperation of many painstaking investigators—a pathologic
physiology which will be the stronghold of scientific medicine.”
As has been seen repeatedly in this work, the Europe-wide Revolutions
of 1848 had broad scientific, political, and artistic implications. Virchow
was swept up by his ideals of social medicine, which destabilized his
position in Berlin. Finding a new home in nearby Würzburg, Virchow
marcin
(Marcin)
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