Rudolf Virchow Quotes

Medical education does not exist to provide students with a way of making a living, but to ensure the health of the community.

Medicine must go back to nature and a physician should be the high priest of nature.

'Science in itself' is nothing, for it exists only in the human beings who are its bearers. 'Science for its own sake' usually means nothing more than science for the sake of the people who happen to be pursuing it.

Cellular pathology is not an end if one cannot see any alteration in the cell. Chemistry brings the clarification of living processes nearer than does anatomy. Each anatomical change must have been preceded by a chemical one.

The task of science, therefore, is not to attack the objects of faith, but to establish the limits beyond which knowledge cannot go and found a unified self-consciousness within these limits.

If we would serve science, we must extend her limits, not only as far as our own knowledge is concerned, but in the estimation of others.

It is the curse of humanity that it learns to tolerate even the most horrible situations by habituation, that it forgets the most shameful happenings in the daily shame of events, and that it can hardly understand when individuals aim to destroy this infamy.

The absence of proof does not constitute the proof of absence.

Body: A cell state in which every cell is a citizen.

The task of science is to stake out the limits of the knowable, and to center consciousness within them.

Belief has no place as far as science reaches, and may be first permitted to take root where science stops.

Only those who regard healing as the ultimate goal of their efforts can, therefore, be designated as physicians.

First, it must be a pleasure to study the human body the most miraculous masterpiece of nature and to learn about the smallest vessel and the smallest fiber. But second and most important, the medical profession gives the opportunity to alleviate the troubles of the body, to ease the pain, to console a person who is in distress, and to lighten the hour of death of many a sufferer.

Marriages are not normally made to avoid having children.

The physicians are the natural attorneys of the poor, and the social problems should largely be solved by them.

As long as vitalism and spiritualism are open questions so long will the gateway of science be open to mysticism.

Medical statistics will be our standard of measurement: we will weigh life for life and see where the dead lie thicker, among the workers or among the privileged.