Servitenkirche and the Saint of Cancer Patients
Why is it significant?
Walk into the little square in front of the Servite church and take in its two towers, its pale facade and the quiet village feeling of this corner of Alsergrund. Freud's neighbours came here to pray, and so, for centuries, did people with diseases no doctor could cure.
Key Facts
| Place | Servitenkirche and the Saint of Cancer Patients |
|---|---|
| Address | Servitengasse 9, 1090 Wien, Austria |
| Geo Coordinates | 48.22070, 16.36360 |
| Part of Walk | Couches, Wax and Radium: Freud's Vienna and the Medical Quarter of Alsergrund |
| Generated | Generated |
Walk into the little square in front of the Servite church and take in its two towers, its pale facade and the quiet village feeling of this corner of Alsergrund. Freud's neighbours came here to pray, and so, for centuries, did people with diseases no doctor could cure.
The church was built between 1651 and 1677 for the Servite order, with money from Ottavio Piccolomini, a general of the Thirty Years' War. Step inside and notice the shape of the nave. It is not a long rectangle but an oval, one of the first of its kind in Vienna, an idea that later baroque architects in the city would take much further.
Now look for the side chapel of Saint Peregrine Laziosi, an Italian Servite friar of the fourteenth century. Legend says he suffered from a terrible wound on his leg, perhaps a tumour, and that the night before it was to be amputated he prayed, fell asleep, and woke up healed. So Peregrine became the patron saint of people with cancer and with diseases of the feet. For generations the Viennese have marked his feast day around the beginning of May with a small fair in front of this church.
It is worth pausing on that. A few hundred metres from here, doctors were about to turn medicine into a science of microscopes, statistics and dissection. But for most people in the eighteenth century, the chapel of a saint was the only clinic they could afford, and a candle was the only treatment on offer.
This whole quarter, the Rossau, was once a riverside suburb of boatmen, timber yards and workshops by the Danube Canal. Now leave the square to the north and walk up the Grünentorgasse and into the Seegasse. Behind the door of a modern retirement home lies one of the most moving places in Vienna.