The German Genius

of Gobineau’s racial beliefs. Rathenau felt that, eventually, the northern European middle classes—people like himself—would come to dominate the world. 35 Educated businessmen were the new aristocracy, who would know where to lead their fellow citizens to the higher, post-material spiritual level. Continuous industrialization, he was convinced, must be accompanied “by ethical achievement.” He was therefore in favor of heavy taxes for the rich both in life and in death—he wanted to see an “uncompromising” inheritance tax and he went so far as to advocate the “abolition of luxury.” “Distribution of property,” he wrote, “is not a private affair, any more than is the right to consume.” 36 And he argued that “richness should be replaced by prosperity which in turn is based on creativity and responsibility for one’s work or one’s own society.” Workers should have a say in management. However, as Hartmut Pogge von Strandmann has pointed out, “there is no evidence to suggest that Rathenau pursued a markedly different line towards his own AEG employees from that of other industrialists towards theirs.” He thought that better working conditions would increase productivity.
    His importance lay in the clarity with which he saw—and described—what was happening in Germany, how the dynamics of modern prosperity were shaped by science and industry and how the country’s traditional elite was failing to adapt. If there was a whiff of sanctimony about his stance, that too was revealing. He was better at identifying problems than at finding solutions. 37

The Dynamics of Disease: Virchow, Koch, Mendel, Freud
     
    R udolf Virchow (1821–1902) was the most successful German physician of the nineteenth century. Besides his clinical and theoretical achievements, his work on the social aspects of medicine mean that he had an impact much wider than the purely medical field. His long career epitomized the rise of German medicine after 1840, an ascendancy that transformed a discipline that was still largely clinical and prescientific. 1
    Born in a small market town in Pomerania, Virchow was educated privately in the classical languages, but he preferred the natural sciences. Because of his abilities, he received in 1839 a military fellowship to study medicine at the Friedrich-Wilhelms Institut in Berlin. This institution was specifically designed to provide an education for those who would not normally be able to afford one, in return for which they joined the army medical service for a specified time. Virchow studied under Johannes Müller and Johann L. Schönlein, who introduced him to the experimental laboratory and modern diagnostics and epidemiological studies, all relatively new.
    Virchow graduated in 1843, his first field job being medical house officer at the Charité Hospital in Berlin, where he made microscopic investigations of vascular inflammation and the problems of thrombosis and embolism.
    Always outspoken, in 1845 he delivered two speeches before an influential audience at the Friedrich-Wilhelms Institut in which he dispensed with all transcendental influences in medicine and argued that progress would only come from three main directions: clinical observations, “including the examination of the patient with the aid of physico-chemical methods” animal experimentation “to test specific aetiologies and study certain drug effects” and pathological anatomy, especially at the microscopic level. “Life,” he insisted, “was merely the sum of physical and chemical actions and essentially the expression of cell activity.” 2 While still in his twenties, in 1847 he was appointed an instructor at the University of Berlin under Müller.
    But he was never just a medical man. In 1848 a typhus epidemic swept through the Prussian province of Upper Silesia, and Virchow was one of the team of physicians sent by the government to visit the afflicted region and survey the damage. While there, Virchow came face-to-face with the destitute Polish minority, struggling in appalling circumstances. And so, instead of returning to Prussia with a set of strictly medical guidelines, Virchow’s report recommended political change, plus sweeping educational and economic reforms. It was hardly what the government had bargained for.
    His political beliefs led him to take part in the uprisings of 1848 in Berlin, where he fought on the barricades, afterward becoming a member of the Berlin Democratic