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.
The best way to conduct research on a larger scale is to make sure everyone knows what everyone else is doing... The sooner the better - start talking to other people about what you're doing. Because that's what will stimulate things the fastest.
As a child, I wanted to know how things worked and to control them. With a friend, I built a number of complicated models that I could control.
We farm workers are closest to food production. We were the first to recognize the serious health hazards of agriculture pesticides to both consumers and ourselves.
If any remedy is tested under controlled scientific conditions and proved to be effective, it will cease to be alternative and will simply become medicine. So-called alternative medicine either hasn't been tested or it has failed its tests.
There are always more questions. Science as a process is never complete. It is not a foot race, with a finish line.... People will always be waiting at a particular finish line: journalists with their cameras, impatient crowds eager to call the race, astounded to see the scientists approach, pass the mark, and keep running. It's a common misunderstanding, he said. They conclude there was no race. As long as we won't commit to knowing everything, the presumption is we know nothing.
This preservation of favourable variations and the destruction of injurious variations, I call Natural Selection, or the Survival of the Fittest. Variations neither useful nor injurious would not be affected by natural selection and would be left a fluctuating element.
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