During the upheavals of 1848, the Berlin doctor and reformer Rudolf Virchow wrote in his new weekly publication that “medicine is a social science, and politics is nothing more than medicine writ large.” Many doctors may have disagreed, but Virchow's statement captures something of the engagement of professionals in the efforts to cure the German body politic of its long-standing illnesses. At the same time, they tried to exploit the mood of change to bring about reforms closer to their immediate interests and to found organizations to formulate their demands.

It could hardly be expected that professionals as badly splintered and unhomogeneous as those of the German states could, in a bare few months, smoothly bring together unified organizations capable of presenting unanimous sets of demands to state and society, and of course they were unable to do so. But the demands of disparate groups do adumbrate, in their aggregate, some of the issues that would recur constantly in the rest of the century and beyond. For this reason alone they deserve some attention in this chapter.

No matter how interesting regional and local professional organizations might be for the development of individual disciplinary professions (showing as they do tendencies toward individuation and interest-group conflict), the former are difficult to use for generalizations about the German professions as a whole. For these, only the arguments and resolutions of national organizations will serve fully.