Virchow's Cellular Pathology

Pathologists in the 1840s still explained much disease through the body's fluids. Rokitansky, who had performed about 60,000 autopsies, held that when no anatomical cause of death could be found, a disorder of the blood produced a formless material, a blastema, from which abnormal cells grew. Rudolf Virchow, a student of Johannes Müller, rejected both the old humoral theory and Rokitansky's version during his most productive years, at Würzburg from 1849 to 1856.

Back in Berlin as professor of pathological anatomy and director of the Pathological Institute, he gave twenty lectures there from February to April 1858 and published them that year as Die Cellularpathologie. His central claim was that a new cell never builds itself out of non-cellular matter: where a cell arises, a cell must already have existed, just as an animal comes only from an animal and a plant from a plant. He put it in Latin: omnis cellula e cellula.

From that principle Virchow built an account of disease. He treated cells as the living units of the body, described the body as a social organization of cells, and set cellular pathology against the humoral and solidist theories. New growths, he argued, came from the division of existing cells, most often in connective tissue, and not from exudates or a free blastema.

Cell division itself was not his discovery. Robert Remak had confirmed division in animal cells as early as 1844, and Virchow published Remak's findings in 1855. According to Hektoen International, it was through the 1858 lectures that cell theory gained acceptance.

An English translation by Frank Chance, made from the second German edition, appeared in 1860.