Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World

by Tracy Kidder

Compared with other historical figures in medicine, such as Pasteur or Schweitzer or Florence Nightingale, Virchow isn’t very well-known. Only one full-length biography of him exists. Yet he was, as one commentator writes, “the principal architect of the foundations of scientific medicine,” the first to propose that the basic units of biological life were self-reproducing cells, and that the study of disease should focus on changes in the cell. Virchow made important contributions in oncology and parasitology, coined at least fifty medical terms still in use today, defined the pathophysiology of a host of diseases, including trichinosis, and led a successful campaign for compulsory meat inspection in Germany. He designed a sewage system for Berlin that transformed it from a fetid sty into one of Europe’s healthiest cities. He founded a nursing school and hospitals. He was a practicing archaeologist and played an instrumental role in Heinrich Schliemann’s excavations of Troy. He helped to define the field of medical anthropology. He was a physician and a teacher and a practicing politician, so nettlesome in opposition to Germany’s imperial ambitions that Bismarck once challenged him to a duel.