Virchow, these days honored as the father of modern pathology, disdained any separation of health from social conditions and culture. “Medicine has imperceptibly led us into the social field and placed us in a position of confronting directly the great problems of our time,” he wrote. When challenged that his advice had more to do with politics than with medicine, Virchow issued his timeless retort: “Medicine is a social science, and politics nothing else but medicine on a large scale.”
