What did Rudolf Virchow suggest about bacterial toxins before they were discovered?

Long before the scientific community had discovered bacterial toxins, Rudolf Virchow suggested that some bacteria might produce these substances to cause disease.1

While Virchow was generally resistant to the emerging field of bacteriology and skeptical that the mere presence of a microorganism necessarily indicated it was the cause of a patient's illness, this specific hypothesis demonstrated his forward-thinking approach to pathological processes. His work primarily focused on cellular pathology, emphasizing that diseases originate within individual cells rather than in organs or tissues as a whole.12