Commemorative stamp series - Germany / German Democratic Republic 1971 - 40 Pfennig

Important Personalities, Edition 1971 Within the series "Important Personalities", the Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications of the German Democratic Republic issues another special postage stamp. No special first day cover envelope 150th birthday of Rudolf Virchow Rudolf Virchow was born on October 13, 1821 in Schievelbein. Virchow, who had devoted himself to medical studies at a young age, joined, as his father could not finance this study, in the training school for budding military doctors, the Berlin Pepinière and in 1843 received the medical doctorate. In the same year he came to the Charité, initially as a company surgeon. As a young doctor Virchow held courses for physicians on pathological anatomy. In 1846 he became a prosector at the Charité. In 1847 he founded together with Reinhardt at the Charité the "Archive for Pathological Anatomy and Physiology and for Clinical Medicine". In the same year he became a Privatdozent at the University. In the spring of 1848, he investigated the causes of a typhus fever epidemic that had broken out in Upper Silesia and ruthlessly uncovered the social ills as the source of the epidemic. During the bourgeois-democratic revolution of 1848 Virchow proved to be associated with the people of the democracies. Because of his democratic activity he was relieved of his post in Berlin. In 1849 he went to Würzburg as professor of pathology and pathological anatomy and took over the first chair of pathological anatomy in Germany. In 1856 he was recalled to Berlin and created here the Pathological Institute. Virchow founded the cellular pathology, the modern science set science on the principle of cell research. These discoveries had enormous implications for all of medicine, especially for embryology, anatomy, and physiology. Virchow's cellular pathology played a positive role in medicine at the time and was historically an advance. She disproved outdated views of life processes and contributed significantly to the scientific foundation of medicine. Extensive activity Virchow developed as an anthropologist and ethnologist. He founded the German Anthropological Society in 1869 and became its chairman in 1870. Virchow was mainly concerned with studies of the skull and stilt houses. He made his own excavations in the Caucasus and participated in the excavations of Heinrich Schliemann in Troy, which he evaluated anthropologically. In 1873, Rudolf Virchow was selected on the suggestion of Du Bois-Reymond and Hermann von Helmholtz member of the Prussian Academy of Sciences, the present German Academy of Sciences in Berlin. Virchow earned great services in the field of public health. Politically he was active since his youth; from 1859 he was a local politician to the Berlin City Council. He was a member of the German Progressive Party founded by him in the Prussian Chamber of Deputies and from 1880 to 1899 a member of the Reichstag. Virchow appeared as a sharp opponent of the "blood and iron policy" Bismarck. Rudolf Virchow died on September 5, 1902 in Berlin. As a researcher, doctor, university teacher and politician, he was also a great humanist. The German Democratic Republic rightly pays tribute to the publication of a special postage stamp by Rudolf Virchow.