Disease is not something personal and special, but only a manifestation of life under modified conditions, operating according to the same laws as apply to the living body at all times, from the first moment until death.
Interpretation
Disease is a natural occurrence in life, shaped by environmental factors rather than being a personal plight.
In this quote, Rudolf Virchow emphasizes that disease is a universal part of life influenced by external conditions rather than a unique, individual affliction. This perspective shifts the understanding of illness from being a personal misfortune to a natural part of the life cycle, governed by the same biological principles that apply to health.
In practice
In a health seminar, to emphasize the commonality of disease in human experience.
Medicine is a social science, and politics is nothing else but medicine on a large scale. Medicine, as a social science, as the science of human beings, has the obligation to point out problems and to attempt their theoretical solution: the politician, the practical anthropologist, must find the means for their actual solution. The physicians are the natural attorneys of the poor, and social problems fall to a large extent within their jurisdiction.
Medical education does not exist to provide students with a way of making a living, but to ensure the health of the community.
The physicians are the natural attorneys of the poor, and the social problems should largely be solved by them.
If popular medicine gave the people wisdom as well as knowledge, it would be the best protection for scientific and well-trained physicians.
No doubt science cannot admit of compromises, and can only bring out the complete truth. Hence there must be controversy, and the strife may be, and sometimes must be, sharp. But must it even then be personal? Does it help science to attack the man as well as the statement? On the contrary, has not science the noble privilege of carrying on its controversies without personal quarrels?
Belief has no place as far as science reaches, and may be first permitted to take root where science stops.
Chemistry is necessarily an experimental science: its conclusions are drawn from data, and its principles supported by evidence from facts.
Isolated facts and experiments have in themselves no value, however great their number may be. They only become valuable in a theoretical or practical point of view when they make us acquainted with the law of a series of uniformly recurring phenomena, or, it may be, only give a negative result showing an incompleteness in our knowledge of such a law, till then held to be perfect.
The fundamental reason why carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is critically important to biology is that there is so little of it. A field of corn growing in full sunlight in the middle of the day uses up all the carbon dioxide within a meter of the ground in about five minutes. If the air were not constantly stirred by convection currents and winds, the corn would stop growing.
I called it ignose, not knowing which carbohydrate it was. This name was turned down by my editor. 'God-nose' was not more successful, so in the end 'hexuronic acid' was agreed upon. To-day the substance is called 'ascorbic acid' and I will use this name.
What we observe as material bodies and forces are nothing but shapes and variations in the structure of space.
What sense would it make or what would it benfit a physician if he discovered the origin of the diseases but could not cure or alleviate them?
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