Portrait of Rudolf Virchow, 1885 (author unknown).

Prof. Rudolf Virchow, who was born on October 13, 1821 in Schivelbein (today Świdwin in Poland), was a renowned physician, pathologist, biologist, anthropologist, writer as well as a highly respected member of the Prussian Parliament and later of the Reichstag (Imperial Diet), whose list of achievements is simply too long to give here in detail.

Suffice to say that Prof. Virchow was not only the first person to precisely describe and name leukaemia, embolism, thrombosis and chordoma (among others) but he was also the first to both notice AND prove the existence of animal infectious diseases which could be passed onto humans. His work on Trichinella spiralis, or “pork worm”, showed without any doubt that the parasite causing trichinosis in both animals and humans was originally carried by the former and passed onto the latter. Virchow´s recommendation that meat, before eating, should…