Nineteenth-century Vienna is well known to medical historians as a leading center of medical research and education, offering easy access to patients and corpses to students from all over the world. The author seeks to explain how this enviable supply of 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 onward. 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 numbers of students 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 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. Keywords: anatomy, dissection, medical education, Vienna, Austro-Hungarian Empire, death, funerary traditions
...More
Article
Chahrour, Marcel;
(2007)
“A Civilizing Mission”? Austrian Medicine and the Reform of Medical Structures in the Ottoman Empire, 1838--1850
(/isis/citation/CBB000831414/)
Article
Elena Varotto;
Mauro Vaccarezza;
Roberta Ballestriero;
Domenico Tafuri;
Francesco Galassi;
(2019)
The teaching of anatomy throughout the centuries: from Herophilus to plastination and beyond
(/isis/citation/CBB228242848/)
Article
Hurren, Elizabeth T.;
(2008)
Whose Body Is It Anyway? Trading the Dead Poor, Coroner's Disputes, and the Business of Anatomy at Oxford University, 1885--1929
(/isis/citation/CBB000930713/)
Article
Hurren, Elizabeth T.;
(2012)
“Abnormalities and Deformities”: The Dissection and Interment of the Insane Poor, 1832--1929
(/isis/citation/CBB001232194/)
Article
Buklijas, Tatjana;
(2007)
Surgery and National Identity in Late Nineteenth-Century Vienna
(/isis/citation/CBB000831417/)
Article
MacDonald, Helen;
(2009)
Procuring Corpses: The English Anatomy Inspectorate, 1842 to 1858
(/isis/citation/CBB000954552/)
Article
Tinne Claes;
(2018)
‘By What Right does the Scalpel Enter the Pauper’s Corpse?’ Dissections and Consent in Late Nineteenth-Century Belgium
(/isis/citation/CBB316895838/)
Book
Giovanni Cipriani;
(2015)
La via della salute. Studi e ricerche di storia della farmacia
(/isis/citation/CBB733953315/)
Article
Vons, Jacqueline;
(2006)
L'Epitome, un ouvrage méconnu d'André Vésale (1543)
(/isis/citation/CBB000931804/)
Chapter
Guerrini, Anita;
(2012)
The Value of a Dead Body
(/isis/citation/CBB001200748/)
Book
Roach, Mary;
(2003)
Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers
(/isis/citation/CBB000302137/)
Article
Johannes Mattes;
(2020)
“To look like an (Earth) scientist”: Science popularization and professionalization based on the example of a photo album dedicated to the Viennese geologist Eduard Suess (1901)
(/isis/citation/CBB844041917/)
Book
Fernández, Enrique;
(2015)
Anxieties of Interiority and Dissection in Early Modern Spain
(/isis/citation/CBB001422602/)
Chapter
Chaplin, Simon;
(2012)
The Divine Touch, or Touching Divines: John Hunter, David Hume, and the Bishop of Durham's Rectum
(/isis/citation/CBB001200747/)
Article
Martínez-Vidal, Àlvar;
Pardo-Tomás, José;
(2005)
Anatomical Theatres and the Teaching of Anatomy in Early Modern Spain
(/isis/citation/CBB000773937/)
Article
Pablo Maurette;
(2018)
The Organ of Organs: Vesalius and the Wonders of the Human Hand
(/isis/citation/CBB281674810/)
Book
Mercuriali, Girolamo;
Crato von Crafftheim, Johannes (1519-1585);
(2016)
Une correspondance entre deux médecins humanistes
(/isis/citation/CBB618935965/)
Article
Messbarger, Rebecca;
(2013)
The Re-Birth of Venus in Florence's Royal Museum of Physics and Natural History
(/isis/citation/CBB001200290/)
Chapter
Vittoria Feola;
(2020)
Riforme mediche di ispirazione patavina nella Vienna del secondo Seicento
(/isis/citation/CBB586689187/)
Book
Elizabeth T. Hurren;
(2021)
Hidden Histories of the Dead: Disputed Bodies in Modern British Medical Research
(/isis/citation/CBB995981550/)
Be the first to comment!