Barbera discusses in her contribution what could best be described as a 'double metaphor': the human body as a political metaphor and the body politic as a medical metaphor. Here medicine and politics metaphorize each other. With a wealth of historical detail Barbera shows that in the beginning of the nineteenth century, when organicist metaphors were widely used in political theory, the link between politics and medicine was closer than ever before or after. Barbera emphasizes that the political use of the metaphor was not without its complications. For if in political thought the term 'organic' is opposed to the terms 'atomistic', 'individual', 'revolutionary' or 'critical', as the followers of Saint Simon and Auguste Comte were apt to do, then organicism unavoidably took on the character of a political program and in doing so became tainted by the same artificiality that these political theorism always sought to contest. But the interaction between medicine and politics was not restricted to the organicist metaphor. Barbera discusses the metaphor of tissue (introduced by Bichat), the metaphor of illness as disorder, which clearly is suggestive of political chaos and, lastly the metaphor of exchange. With the last metaphor we leave politics for medicine. For the notion of (economic) exchange was used in medicine as a metaphor of nutrition and of metabolism. It is the main purpose of Barbera's essay to demonstrate that this (political) metaphor of exchange stimulated the nineteenth century physiologist R. Virchow to defend new and original insights in his 'Die Kritiker der CellularPathologie'. Thanks to a political metaphor Virchow developed a new conception of the cell of how the cell determines metabolism and bodily growth. And the amazing conclusion follows that, at least in this case medicine owes more to politics than political thought to medicine. (from the introduction)