Article ID: CBB000831417

Surgery and National Identity in Late Nineteenth-Century Vienna (2007)

unapi

Buklijas, Tatjana (Author)


Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences
Volume: 38
Pages: 756--774


Publication Date: 2007
Edition Details: Part of a special section:“Science, Medicine and Nationalism in the Habsburg Empire from the 1840s to 1918”
Language: English

For historians of medicine, the professor Theodor Billroth of the University of Vienna was the leading European surgeon of the 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.

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Description Shows how Viennese surgery split into two camps: one, headed by Theodor Billroth of the University of Vienna, allied with the German educational model, German nationalism, and racial anti-Semitism; and the other, embracing a clinically oriented medical education for an ethnically and socially diverse population.


Included in

Article Tatjana Buklijas, Emese Lafferton (2007) Introduction: Science, Medicine and Nationalism in the Habsburg Empire from the 1840s to 1918. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences (p. 679). unapi

Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB000831417/

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Authors & Contributors
Lily B. Z. L. Shaw
Natali Valdez
Fitzharris, Lindsey
Natalie Lira
Robert A. Shaw
Chanoff, David
Concepts
Medical education and teaching
Medicine
Medicine and politics
Medicine and race
Surgery
Biographies
Time Periods
19th century
20th century, early
20th century
21st century
Places
Great Britain
United States
South Africa
Austro-hungary
Vienna (Austria)
Québec (Canada)
Institutions
McGill University
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