Rudolf Virchow Award

Each year, the Critical Anthropology of Health Caucus of the Society for Medical Anthropology awards two prizes, one for a student and one for a professional, to papers published the previous year that best represent the scope of our group. The Rudolf Virchow Award honors an article or paper written in the spirit of Rudolf Virchow, and is deemed to best reflect, extend and advance critical perspectives in medical anthropology. Critical perspectives adopt materialist approaches that emphasize the social and political economic nature of health, diseases and healing. They embrace and integrate macro and micro perspectives.

Rudolf Virchow, a German physician writing during the 1800s, was a key founder of social medicine. In addition to writing in the areas of anthropology and medical science, his contributions to social medicine centered on his recognition of the multiple interacting factors, particularly social factors, that produce disease and illness. He argued that the difficult circumstances and deprivations of the working class increase susceptibility to disease as well as to higher mortality rates. Virchow also recognized the political and material circumstances that inhibited disease prevention efforts and viewed advocacy as an essential part of medical research. He was perhaps most articulate about the limitations of medical science to improving health in the absence of material security. Virchow viewed the state as responsible for providing that security through employment of those who could work. His appreciation for the complex relationship among health, medicine and society are remembered in his statement, “Medicine is a social science, and politics is nothing more than medicine in larger scale.”

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