The important thing to realize is that Virchow's report was a part of German history German historians refer to as Vormärz, a periodization of that roughly covers 1815-1848. This period was characterized by tensions between a growing and active political culture, especially among the middle strata of society, and reactionary and conservative state. Added to this political pot was a growing economic crisis as industrialization created economic dislocations in the 1840s. Silesia, whose main industry was weaving, was particularly hard hit by the transition to industrial production. The region had been rocked by large labor protests in 1844/45, an incident celebrated by the poet Heine in his poem "Die schlesischen Weber". Therefore, it was no surprise that when revolutions broke out throughout Germany in 1848, Silesia was one of the more radical strongholds and the region's deputies to the Paulskirche Parliament were more open to radical change.

It was within this context that Virchow was operating. Historians describe Virchow as a German liberal, which generally means very middle-class, nationalistic, and a believer in constitutionalism. However, the darker side of German liberalism in this period was that it tended to be sharply divided among confessional lines with Protestant liberals seeing Catholics of all stripes as culturally inferior and backwards. Moreover, German liberalism often had a strong streak of Polonophobia whose expression could range from condescending views of Poles as naive simpletons, pushing social policies to "uplift" Poles by Germanizing them, or ,more seriously, treating Poles as alien inhabitants of historically German land in the East. Although Virchow made a name for himself after the failure of the 1848 revolutions fighting the archconservative Prussian chancellor Otto von Bismarck, after German unification in 1871, Virchow quite willingly supported Bismarck's anti-Catholic policies known as the Kulturkampf. Although this support for anti-Catholic legislation came some thirty years after Virchow's typhus report on Silesia, one can see glimpses of Virchow's anti-Catholic stance in the report. Silesia was over 50% Catholic at midcentury, and Upper Silesia in particular was nearly 90% Catholic.

For more sources, BBC's In Our Time has a good roundtable podcast on 1848. A good overview of the revolutionary year, as well as its origins and aftermath is Jonathan Sperber's The European Revolutions, 1848–1851. The anthology Europe in 1848: Revolution and Reform, edited by Dieter Dowe, has some good entries on rural revolution in 1848. Dieter Langewiesche's survey Liberalism in Germany is the standard English-language survey on liberalism in Germany. You also might want to check out the portrait of Virchow in Andrew Zimmermann's Anthropology and Antihumanism in Imperial Germany, which presents a fairly complicated picture of the man.