The century that the Medical-Surgical Friedrich Wilhelm Institute intends to celebrate has brought the greatest change to medicine that it has ever experienced. Following this change through all the many branches of knowledge that we summarize under the common name of medicine would be such a vast undertaking that it would not fit into the current commemorative publication. The task that will be attempted here must naturally be more narrowly defined: it will focus on representing the change that has occurred in the scientific foundation that all branches of medicine require for their development. This work is the commemorative publication for the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Medical-Surgical Friedrich Wilhelm Institute, written by Rudolf Virchow. The commemorative publication deals with.