["...impossible, to find something specific in it". Rudolf Virchow and tumor pathology]

The idea that cancerous tumours may contain specific ("heterologous") elements became widespread at the beginning of the 1850s, especially in France and among the followers of the clinical pathologist Hermann Lebert (1813-1878). Rudolf Virchow (1821-1902), however, was convinced that the strategy of searching for physiological, chemical, and microscopic singularities was wrong if the scientist wanted to differentiate between tumorous and other tissues. The reason for Virchow's sceptical view was that he deeply disagreed with ontological pathologists who tried to specify the entity of disease outside the patient's body. Virchow strongly believed that the tumour, like any other physiological or pathological phenomenon, was always a part of the patient's body, being strictly subject to the laws of biology. Virchow consistently applied the concept of the cell as the place of all pathological processes even to tumour pathology. This idea had been very helpful to a uniform examination of all biological processes during the 1850s, but was losing much of its advantage with regard to the histopathological diagnosis of cancer towards the end of the 19th century. Virchow was convinced that he could only preserve his uniform cellular theory by doing without a specific characterization of the tumour cell. The dilemma intensified because even in the 1880s he insisted that tumour cells descended from the connective tissues. This precarious situation can be demonstrated by a historical review of Virchow's diagnostic problems concerning the larynx carcinoma of the Prussian crown prince in 1887/88. While Virchow still concentrated on his former opponents of the 1850s, these scholars were no longer doing any scientific research during the late 1880s.