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.
This afternoon, I've arranged for this ceremony to be illuminated by solar power.
It is the very strangeness of nature that makes science engrossing. That ought to be at the center of science teaching. There are more than seven-times-seven types of ambiguity in science, awaiting analysis. The poetry of Wallace Stevens is crystal-clear alongside the genetic code.
I'll change the posture of our federal government from being one of the most anti-science administrations in American history to one that embraces science and technology.
Science has always been my preoccupation and when you think a breakthrough is possible, it is terribly exciting.
If you come from mathematics, as I do, you realize that there are many problems, even classical problems, which cannot be solved by computation alone.
The work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus.
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