De-centering Rudolf Virchow: the making of a social medicine pioneer

Rudolf Virchow is regularly celebrated as one of the fathers of social medicine. This chapter explores the context in which Virchow wrote and published his famous statement that ‘Medicine is a social science, and politics nothing but medicine at a larger scale’. I discuss Virchow’s epidemiological fact-finding mission to Upper Silesia and his involvement in the revolutionary events of 1848 and 1849. I also look at the ways in which Virchow’s achievements were framed during his lifetime and in the early twentieth century, when medicine in Germany was perceived, by many, to be undergoing a crisis, caused by materialism, specialisation and a growing dominance of laboratory medicine –developments then seen as in line with Virchow’s aims. I argue that what we think of as social medicine today is an American tradition, which emerged at a particular point of time in the mid-twentieth century, and that the image of Virchow as the father of social medicine was created then, by scholars and activists such as George Rosen and Henry Sigerist, to provide this new tradition with a longer pedigree.