Old General Hospital and Ignaz Semmelweis
Why is it significant?
Walk into the huge first courtyard of the old General Hospital, lined with long, low wings, lawns and chestnut trees, and full of students carrying laptops. Over the gate on the Alser Straße you can read the Latin words Saluti et solatio aegrorum, for the health and comfort of the sick.
Key Facts
| Place | Old General Hospital and Ignaz Semmelweis |
|---|---|
| Address | Alser Straße 4, 1090 Wien, Austria |
| Geo Coordinates | 48.21510, 16.35140 |
| Part of Walk | Couches, Wax and Radium: Freud's Vienna and the Medical Quarter of Alsergrund |
| Generated | Generated |
Walk into the huge first courtyard of the old General Hospital, lined with long, low wings, lawns and chestnut trees, and full of students carrying laptops. Over the gate on the Alser Straße you can read the Latin words Saluti et solatio aegrorum, for the health and comfort of the sick.
Joseph the Second opened this hospital in 1784. With around two thousand beds, it was one of the largest in Europe, built around courtyard after courtyard. Here, in the nineteenth century, the doctors of the so-called Second Viennese Medical School, men like Carl von Rokitansky and Joseph Škoda, turned medicine into a discipline of autopsy, observation and diagnosis.
And here, in the maternity wards, a young Hungarian doctor named Ignaz Semmelweis noticed something terrible. In one clinic, staffed by doctors and students, many more mothers died of childbed fever than in the other, staffed by midwives. In 1847 his colleague Jakob Kolletschka cut his finger during an autopsy and died of an illness that looked just like that fever. Semmelweis understood: doctors were coming straight from the dissecting room to the delivery room, carrying death on their hands.
He ordered everyone to wash their hands in a solution of chlorinated lime, and the death rate in his clinic fell dramatically. There was no germ theory yet to explain why it worked, and many senior colleagues refused to accept that they themselves had been the cause. Semmelweis left Vienna, grew bitter, and died in 1865 in an asylum near the city. Only later did Pasteur and Lister prove him right.
Since 1998 these courtyards have been a university campus, and the hospital moved to a new building nearby long ago. So this is where the walk ends: from Freud's couch to Semmelweis's washbasin, Alsergrund is the place where Vienna learned to look at the body and the mind with new eyes. And the next time you wash your hands, think of him.