Rudolf Ludwig Carl Virchow was a German physician, anthropologist, pathologist, prehistorian, biologist, writer, editor, and politician. He is known as "the father of modern pathology" and as the founder of social medicine, and to his colleagues, the "Pope of medicine".

In the history of Germany, the Kulturkampf was the seven-year political conflict (1871–1878) between the Catholic Church in Germany, led by Pope Pius IX, and the Kingdom of Prussia, led by chancellor Otto von Bismarck. The Prussian church-and-state political conflict was about the Church's direct control over both education and ecclesiastical appointments in the Prussian kingdom as a Roman Catholic nation and country. Moreover, when compared to other church-and-state conflicts about political culture, the German Kulturkampf of Prussia also featured anti-Polish bigotry fueled by "racist anxieties" in Germany "about the Polish portions of the Prussian East."