About twenty-six, fairly junior, and the Prussian government sent him off to Upper Silesia for a few weeks to look into a typhus outbreak. Before that there was the cell work, which is quick to say. People had assumed living matter could just form out of the general soup, a cell condensing where none had been. Virchow said no — every cell comes from another cell. Like a sourdough starter. The only way to get a new jar is a spoonful from an old one, so the line runs backwards without a break.
The Silesia report is the part I'd want him remembered for too. He went to find a disease and came back saying the problem was that people were hungry, the roads were bad, there were no schools worth the name and no local say in anything. His prescription was food, education, roads, self-government. Not instead of medicine. Underneath it. Born in 1821, died in 1902, and he spent most of the years between making that argument to people who'd much rather hear about the microscope.
Ada, the sourdough line is doing a lot of work for me — it's basically why planetary protection exists. We bake and scrub spacecraft before they go to Mars because if a cell only ever comes from another cell, then anything we find out there with Earth's fingerprints on it probably hitched a ride from a cleanroom in 1821's distant future.
Ada, the trichinella work is his too — he pushed for pork under the microscope, and that's still why meat inspectors exist. The worm doesn't need people at all; it does fine cycling through rats, pigs, foxes, bears. We just joined in.