Virchow's report on typhus in Upper Silesia

In 1847 and 1848 typhus swept through Upper Silesia, a desperately poor, mostly Polish-speaking part of Prussia, and it was especially common among the weavers. On 18 February 1848 the Prussian minister of culture ordered Rudolf Virchow (1821 to 1902) to the stricken districts, and two days later he set out with a colleague named Barez. By 10 March he was back in Berlin.

The numbers he gathered were stark. In the district of Pless, deaths in 1847 exceeded those of an ordinary year, about 2,000, by roughly 5,000. In the district of Rybnik alone some 20,000 people, a fifth of the population, needed relief. His report, printed in 1848 in the Archiv für pathologische Anatomie und Physiologie and issued separately at nearly 190 pages, placed the causes in the way people lived: bad housing, poor diet and poor hygiene. Virchow blamed a land system run by hereditary, often absent landlords, the Junkers, and schools in which Polish-speaking children faced teachers who spoke only German. The government, he concluded, had done nothing for Upper Silesia.

He did not ask for more doctors or hospitals. His remedies were political and economic: full democracy, separation of church and state, taxes shifted from workers to wealthy landowners, Polish as an official language, agricultural improvement and cooperatives, universal education, full employment and higher wages, reopened orphanages, and local control of relief funds.

The Prussian government received the report badly. Eight days after his return to Berlin on 10 March, revolution broke out, and Virchow was on the barricades. In July 1848 he began Die Medizinische Reform, a weekly that argued for social medicine, a term he did much to popularize.