Friedrich Engels was only twenty-four years old when he wrote “The Condition of the Working Class in England”. Even though he was a high school drop-out, Engels developed the concept of social determinants of health and diseases 150 years before the World Health Organization (WHO) defined it. The dialectical materialist approach he employed in his analyses proved a useful way of interpreting the “causes of the causes” of diseases. Rudolf Virchow, the prominent German physician, translated Engels’ ideas into medical language and promoted socialist medicine in Europe. His famous report on Upper Silesia typhus epidemic became the masterpiece of socialist medicine.