Rudolf Virchow ('Cellular Pathology')

Spy renders the German pathologist and politician Rudolf Virchow as a compact, slightly top-heavy figure in a double-breasted frock coat and bow tie, hands clasped at the waist — the posture of a man accustomed to lecturing. The caption 'Cellular Pathology' salutes Virchow's foundational 1858 doctrine that disease originates at the cellular level, work that remade modern medicine. The caricature exaggerates his large ears, round pince-nez, and white beard into gentle comic currency without ethnic malice — Virchow was famous enough in Britain to need no political shorthand. He was also a liberal Reichstag deputy who coined the word 'Realpolitik' as an insult at Bismarck, a detail Vanity Fair's cosmopolitan readership would have savored.