Suchergebnisse

Nineteenth-century Vienna is well known to medical historians as a leading centre of medical research and education, offering easy access to patients and corpses to students from all over the world. This article seeks to explain how this enviable supply with cadavers was achieved, why it provoked so little opposition at a time when Britain and the United States saw widespread protests against dissection, and how it was threatened from mid-century. To understand permissive Viennese attitudes we need to place them in a longue durée history of death and dissection, and to pay close attention to the city's political geography as it was transformed into a major imperial capital. The tolerant stance of the Roman Catholic Church, strong links to Southern Europe and the weak position of individuals in the absolutist state all contributed to an idiosyncratic anatomical culture. But as the fame of the Vienna medical school peaked in the later 1800s, the increased demand created by rising student numbers combined with intensified interdisciplinary competition to produce a shortfall that professors found increasingly difficult to meet. Around 1900, new religious groups and mass political parties challenged the long-standing anatomical practice by refusing to supply cadavers and making dissection into an instrument of political struggle. This study of the material preconditions for anatomy at one of Europe's most influential medical schools provides a contrast to the dominant Anglo-American histories of death and dissection.

For historians of medicine, the professor Theodor Billroth of the University of Vienna was the leading European surgeon of late nineteenth century and the personification of intervention by organ or body part removal. For social and political historians, he was a German nationalist whose book on medical education heralded the rise of anti-Semitism in the Austrian public sphere. This article brings together and critically reassesses these two hitherto separate accounts to show how, in a period of dramatic social and political change, Viennese surgery split into two camps. One, headed by Billroth, was characterized by an alliance with the German educational model, German nationalism leading to racial anti-Semitism and an experimental approach to the construction of surgical procedure, which heavily relied on the methods of pathological physiology. The other, which followed a long Austrian tradition, stood for a clinically-oriented and strictly organized medical education that catered to an ethnically and socially diverse population and, simultaneously, for an anatomically oriented surgery, largely of the locomotor apparatus. This study shows how, in a major centre of medical education and capital of a multiethnic empire, surgical and national identities were forged together.