As a cofounder and member of the liberal party Rudolf Virchow was a leading political antagonist of Otto von Bismarck. He was opposed to Bismarck’s excessive military budget, which angered Bismarck enough to challenge Virchow to a duel in 1865.
Of the two versions, one has Virchow declining because he considered dueling an uncivilized way to solve a conflict. The second has passed into legend, but was well documented in the contemporary scientific literature.
It said that Virchow, having been the challenged and therefore entitled to choose the weapons, selecting two pork sausages, a normal sausage and another one, loaded with Trichinella larvae, or roundworm.
His challenger declined the proposition as too risky. One area where Virchow co-operated with Bismarck was in the Kulturkampf, the anticlerical campaign against the Catholic Church, claiming the anticlerical laws bore "the character of a great struggle in the interest of humanity". During the discussion of Falk’s May Laws, Virchow first used the term.