Rudolf Virchow

Sent in 1848 to report on a typhus epidemic among Polish-speaking weavers in Upper Silesia, Virchow came back with a document that barely mentions medicine. The cause, he wrote, was poverty, damp housing, a diet of potatoes, illiteracy and a government that treated the region as a colony; the remedy was democracy, education and full employment. He concluded that physicians are the natural attorneys of the poor and that medicine is a social science. He lost his post for it, and joined the barricades that year.

His Cellular Pathology of 1858 established that disease is a matter of cells and that every cell comes from a cell — the idea that turned pathology into a science. He also designed Berlin's water supply and sewers, insisted on meat inspection, founded a hospital and two museums, excavated with Schliemann at Troy, and sat in the Reichstag opposing Bismarck, who is said to have considered challenging him to a duel. He died at eighty from complications of a broken hip after jumping from a moving tram. He is buried in Schöneberg.