Colonial Fantasies, Imperial Realities

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Lenny A. Ureña Valerio. Colonial Fantasies, Imperial Realities

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Colonial Fantasies, Imperial Realities

Series Editor: John J. Bukowczyk, Wayne State University

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Virchow was one of the most influential German physicians and physical anthropologists in the nineteenth century. He was born in Pomerania, a province with a significant number of Kashubian and Polish speakers. According to medical historian Paolo Scarani, Virchow’s ethnic ancestry is controversial, suggesting that the physician might have been of Polish or Slavic descent. Scarani argues that the experiences the physician had with Poles in his native land of Pomerania must have at least influenced him regarding the respect he professed for Polish and Slavic cultures and the political and social actions he took as a scientist.46

The physician made important contributions in the fields of anatomical pathology, experimental science, and public health. In the 1870s, Virchow headed the canalization and hygienic reforms that modernized and protected Berlin from many infectious diseases. He was a prolific writer and social activist, having socialist inclinations in the 1840s but becoming a staunch antisocialist after national unification. He warned his colleagues about the dangers of Darwinist evolutionary theories and socialism in a paper he delivered to the German Association of Naturalists and Physicians in 1877.47 In the 1880s, he opposed Germany’s overseas colonial expansion and remained a critic of the germ theory of disease until his death in 1902. For Virchow, medicine was “a social science, and politics [was] nothing more than medicine on a grand scale.”48 The physician believed that the teachings of medicine should be used to alleviate social ills and improve the living conditions of the less fortunate in society.

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