Virchow Explains Pulmonary Embolism
Poet involved
What happened
In 1856, Rudolf Virchow published influential work explaining how clots formed in veins could break away and lodge in the lungs as pulmonary emboli. He clarified the relationship between thrombosis, embolism and blood flow. His ideas became central to later diagnosis and treatment of deep vein thrombosis and pulmonary embolism.
Literary impact
Virchow gave medicine a language for a hidden, sudden danger that could strike without visible wound. This matters for literary history because many nineteenth-century writers, including Walt Whitman after his stroke, lived before modern clot prevention could alter such fates.
Source: Wikipedia
