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.

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

Between animal and human medicine, there is no dividing line-nor should there be.

The body is a cell state in which every cell is a citizen. Disease is merely the conflict of the citizens of the state brought about by the action of external forces.

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

It is the curse of humanity that it learns to tolerate even the most horrible situations by habituation.

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

Medicine is a social science, and politics is nothing more than medicine on a grand scale.

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.

If popular medicine gave the people wisdom as well as knowledge, it would be the best protection for scientific and well-trained physicians.

My politics were those of prophylaxis, my opponents preferred those of palliation.

Brevity in writing is the best insurance for its perusal.

There can be no scientific dispute with respect to faith, for science and faith exclude one another.

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.

Imprisoned quacks are always replaced by new ones.

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

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.

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

Life itself is but the expression of a sum of phenomena, each of which follows the ordinary physical and chemical laws.

Laws should be made, not against quacks but against superstition.

Marriages are not normally made to avoid having children.

Belief cannot be reckoned with in terms of science, for science and faith are mutually exclusive.

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