Every time I think of M.K.’s case and my memories of him in his hospital room—his father trudging to Boston’s North End in the snow to bring him his favorite Italian meatballs, only to find them untouched by the young man’s bedside, and the mystified, befuddled doctors writing medical note after note with multiple question marks crisscrossing the pages—I also think of Rudolf Virchow, and the “new” pathology that he advanced.
