Word: virchow
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Cancer: The Wound That Never Heals Back in the 1860s, renowned pathologist Rudolf Virchow speculated that cancerous tumors arise at the site of chronic inflammation. A century later, oncologists paid more attention to the role that various genetic mutations play in promoting abnormal growths that eventually become malignant. Now researchers are exploring the possibility that mutation and inflammation are mutually reinforcing processes that, left unchecked, can transform normal cells into potentially deadly tumors...
...notion that disease originates in cells rather than tissues or organs, introduced in the mid-19th century by the German pathologist Rudolf Virchow, brought on just such a radical change in perspective. So too did the germ theory, based on British surgeon Joseph Lister's application of Louis Pasteur's work to prevent wound infections. Each was the result of thousands of meticulous observations made over many years. Virchow's studies were done in a university setting; Lister's in a laboratory that he and his wife set up in the kitchen of their home, where they worked tirelessly until...
...Both Virchow and Lister faced not only opposition but scorn until the medical mandarins of the day were finally brought around to admitting the truths on which the scientists' work was based. Lister, in particular, was ridiculed or ignored by his fellow surgeons, who refused to acknowledge the marvels he was accomplishing. But he forced himself to overcome his own gentle nature, persisting with the zeal of an evangelist. In the end, honored by Queen Victoria as Baron Lister, he lived to see his name ranked with those of the greatest medical thinkers of all time. As for Virchow...
...most scientists of the time disputed even the Neanderthal man's antiquity. Rudolf Virchow, a respected German anatomist, pronounced the caveman to be a modern Homo sapiens, whose deformations were caused by rickets in childhood and arthritis later in life. And his flattened skull? He had suffered powerful blows to the head, Virchow opined...
...Virchow's views were widely accepted until 1886, when two more Neanderthal skeletons were discovered in a cave in the Spy region of Belgium. While Virchow claimed that these too were the remains of diseased modern humans, other scientists regarded such a coincidence as unlikely; they were more impressed by primitive tools and the remnants of extinct animals found near the skeletons. The Neanderthals, they agreed, were ancient. Still, they insisted that, Darwin's controversial new theory notwithstanding, the strange creatures could not possibly be ancestral to exalted human beings like themselves...