The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human

by Siddhartha Mukherjee

In 1859, he was elected to the Berlin City Council (and eventually, in the 1880s, to the Reichstag). And he began to witness in Germany the resurgence of a malignant form of radical nationalism that would eventually culminate in the Nazi state. The central myth of what would later be termed “Aryan” racial superiority, and a nation dominated by “clean” Volk who were blond, blue eyed, and white skinned, was a pathology already sweeping malevolently through the country. Virchow’s response, characteristically, was to reject accepted wisdom and to try to restrain the surging myth of racial division: in 1876, he began to coordinate a study of 6.76 million Germans to determine their hair color and skin tone. The results belied the mythology of the state. Only one in three Germans bore the hallmarks of Aryan superiority, while more than half was a mixture: some permutation of brown or white skinned, or blond or brown haired and blue eyed or brown eyed. Notably, 47 percent of Jewish children possessed a similar permutation of features, and a full 11 percent of Jewish children were blond and blue eyed—indistinguishable from the Aryan ideal. He published the data in the Archive of Pathology in 1886, three years before the birth of an Austrian-born German demagogue who would prove to be a master of myth building and would succeed, despite scientific data, to create races out of faces and utterly destroy the ideas of civility that Virchow had so radically advanced.