Couches, Wax and Radium: Freud's Vienna and the Medical Quarter of Alsergrund

From Berggasse 19 to the old General Hospital: the Vienna district where psychoanalysis was born, a tower for the insane was built, radium was studied and doctors learned to wash their hands

Vienna · 11 stops · 25 min audio · Generated

  1. 1. Sigmund Freud Museum, Berggasse 19

    Berggasse 19, 1090 Wien, Austria

    Stand on the sloping pavement of the Berggasse and find number 19, a sober apartment block with a red and white flag by the door bearing a single name: Freud. For forty-seven years, from 1891 to 1938, this was the address where the twentieth century learned to look inside itself.

    Sigmund Freud lived upstairs with his wife Martha, their six children and his sister-in-law Minna, and he saw patients in rooms on the same floor. Here he wrote The Interpretation of Dreams, which appeared in November 1899 but was dated 1900, as if he knew it belonged to the new century. On Wednesday evenings a small circle of doctors and thinkers met in his waiting room, the seed of the psychoanalytic movement. His study was crowded with small antiquities, Egyptian, Greek and Roman figures that he collected passionately and liked to keep on his desk as he wrote.

    The famous couch is not here. It travelled with him to London. But in May 1938 a young photographer, Edmund Engelman, quietly photographed every room, every desk and every antique figure on the shelves, knowing the Freuds were about to leave. Those pictures are why we know what Berggasse 19 looked like, and the waiting room, sent back later by his daughter Anna, is the original furniture.

    After the Anschluss in March 1938, the Gestapo searched the apartment and questioned Anna Freud. With help from abroad, and after paying the so-called flight tax, the family left for London in June. Freud died there in September 1939. Four of his sisters stayed behind in Vienna. All four were deported and murdered in the Holocaust.

    The museum was renovated and reopened in 2020, and it is one of the few places where you can stand in the very rooms in which an idea was born. Now walk a few steps down the Berggasse, turn left into the Servitengasse, and you will see a baroque church at the end of the lane.

  2. 2. Servitenkirche and the Saint of Cancer Patients

    Servitengasse 9, 1090 Wien, Austria

    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.

  3. 3. The Old Jewish Cemetery in the Seegasse

    Seegasse 9, 1090 Wien, Austria

    Pass through the lobby of the retirement home at Seegasse 9, and the back windows open onto something you would never expect: a garden of leaning gravestones, mossy and crooked, between the trees. This is the oldest surviving Jewish cemetery in Vienna.

    Burials here go back to the sixteenth century, and the oldest stones are from the 1500s. It served the Jewish community until 1783, when Emperor Joseph the Second banned new burials inside the city's outer wall for reasons of hygiene, one of the first public health laws of modern Vienna. Among those who lie here are Samuel Oppenheimer and Samson Wertheimer, the great court bankers who financed Habsburg armies around 1700. Even after the expulsion of the Jews from Vienna in 1670, the cemetery survived, and the community that slowly returned went on burying its dead here.

    Look for a stone carved with a fish. Legend tells of a fish, caught for a Sabbath meal, that cried out in a human voice before it was killed, and was then buried here like a person. Historians suspect the carving simply belonged to a man named Fisch. But in Vienna, a good legend is never allowed to die.

    During the Nazi period this cemetery was in danger of being destroyed completely. In 1943, members of the Jewish community managed to carry many of the gravestones to the Central Cemetery and bury them there, to save them. Decades later, in 1984, a large number were found again, and over the following years they were brought back and set up once more.

    Some stand where they once stood, others where they could be placed. Not every stone has found its grave. And yet the old residents of the home sit at their windows above it every day, and the graves are no longer forgotten. Now walk west along the Seegasse and turn right into the Porzellangasse and then left, to the gates of a princely garden.

  4. 4. Liechtenstein Garden Palace

    Fürstengasse 1, 1090 Wien, Austria

    Stand at the end of the Fürstengasse, the Princes' Lane, and look down the axis to the pale baroque palace in its garden. Around 1700 this was open countryside outside the walls, and the Princes of Liechtenstein built themselves a summer residence here.

    In 1687 Prince Johann Adam Andreas of Liechtenstein bought land in this area. He built not only a palace but also a whole new settlement next to it, with a brewery, workshops and houses for craftsmen, and he named it Lichtental. So the suburb you are about to cross was, quite literally, a princely business plan. The garden in front of you, later reshaped in the more natural English style, is open to everyone today as a quiet green shortcut through the district. Nearby, the Porzellangasse is named after Vienna's first porcelain manufactory, founded in this quarter in 1718, when making true porcelain was still a closely guarded chemical secret in Europe.

    The palace was finished in the early eighteenth century, and its great hall carries a vast ceiling fresco by Andrea Pozzo, the Jesuit master of illusion, showing the deeds of Hercules. Pozzo was famous for painting flat ceilings so cleverly that they seem to open into domes and skies. It is perspective, mathematics and optics, used to fool the human eye. In a way, it is the science of perception, two centuries before Freud's science of the mind.

    Today the palace shows parts of the princely collections of Liechtenstein, among them great works by Rubens, mostly on guided visits, and it hosts concerts and events. For some years, from 1979 to 2001, it even housed Vienna's museum of modern art, before that moved into the MuseumsQuartier.

    The family that built it still owns it, and still rules a small country of its own between Switzerland and Austria. Few aristocratic houses kept so much through two world wars and a revolution. Now leave the garden behind and walk north up the Liechtensteinstraße towards Lichtental, the village the prince founded, to its parish church.

  5. 5. Lichtental Parish Church, Schubert's Church

    Marktgasse 40, 1090 Wien, Austria

    Turn into the little Marktgasse and face the twin-towered church at its end, its baroque facade almost too grand for this modest street. This is the parish church of Lichtental, dedicated to the Fourteen Holy Helpers.

    Those fourteen saints were a medieval emergency service. Each was invoked against a particular trouble: one against headaches, one against throat illness, another against fever, another against a sudden death. People prayed to them especially in times of plague, and Vienna knew plenty of those. So in a walk through the history of medicine, here is the old pharmacy of the soul.

    In this church, on the first of February 1797, a baby named Franz Peter Schubert was baptised, the twelfth child of a local schoolmaster. He sang here as a boy, played the violin, and in 1814, at just seventeen, heard his first Mass, in F major, performed in this church for a parish celebration. The soprano solo was sung by Therese Grob, a local girl he is believed to have loved and hoped to marry. He had no money and no position, and she married someone else.

    You may hear people call this the Schubertkirche, Schubert's church, and the organ loft still feels like the place where a shy teenager first discovered he was a composer. His earliest real teacher was the church's own choirmaster, Michael Holzer, who reportedly said he had nothing left to teach the boy. There is a lovely injustice in it: the most local of geniuses, who barely left Vienna, became famous almost everywhere except in his own lifetime.

    Keep that in mind for the next stop, because Schubert's short life is also a story about medicine, about what doctors in his time could and could not do. Walk west to the Nussdorfer Straße and turn right. A few steps along, a modest yellow house waits with a plaque beside the gate.

  6. 6. Schubert's Birthplace

    Nußdorfer Straße 54, 1090 Wien, Austria

    Step through the gateway at Nussdorfer Straße 54 into a small courtyard with galleries running around it and a single tree. It feels like the inside of a village, and that is what this was: a suburban house where many families lived around a shared yard.

    Franz Schubert was born here on the 31st of January 1797. His father ran a school in the same building, and the family is thought to have lived in a single room with a kitchen. Of the fourteen children Schubert's mother bore, only five survived childhood. That was not unusual. In Vienna around 1800, a family expected to bury some of its children, and nobody knew why fevers spread.

    Schubert died in November 1828, at the age of thirty-one. His death was recorded as nervous fever, a term that usually meant typhoid. In his mid-twenties he had also fallen seriously ill, most biographers believe with syphilis, and the treatments of the time, including mercury, may have done him as much harm as good. Doctors could describe a disease, give it a name, and bleed the patient. They could rarely explain it.

    And yet in those last years he wrote some of the most extraordinary music ever composed: song cycles, string quartets, the great late piano sonatas. He was so short-sighted, the story goes, that he slept with his glasses on, so he could start writing the moment he woke. In 1801 the family moved to a larger house nearby, on the Säulengasse, where the school grew and where much of his early music was written.

    Within a generation of his death, the hospital a few streets south of here would start turning medicine into a science of observation, numbers and autopsy, the so-called Second Viennese Medical School. Diseases that killed Schubert's siblings would gradually become understood. Now walk back down towards the Liechtensteinstraße and look for an Art Nouveau staircase climbing the hill on your right.

  7. 7. Strudlhofstiege

    Strudlhofstiege, Liechtensteinstraße, 1090 Wien, Austria

    Stand at the foot of the staircase on the Liechtensteinstraße and follow it with your eyes as it climbs: ramps that split and meet again, curved balustrades, lanterns on slender posts, and a little fountain in the middle. This is the Strudlhofstiege, finished in 1910.

    It solves a simple problem with great elegance. The ground here drops sharply from the higher streets to the old riverside level, and people needed a way down. The city architect Johann Theodor Jaksch turned a set of steps into a piece of theatre, with landings where you can pause, look, and be seen. The climb takes less than a minute, but the design makes you want to slow down and turn around halfway to admire the view.

    The name comes from much earlier. Around 1700, the court painter Peter Strudel owned an estate on this slope, and he ran a private art school in his house. That school is counted among the beginnings of Vienna's Academy of Fine Arts. So painting students drew from life on this hillside long before anyone built a staircase.

    The stairs became famous in 1951, when Heimito von Doderer published his novel The Strudlhof Steps. It is a long, winding book about Viennese lives before and after the First World War, and the staircase is the place where its characters keep meeting, missing each other and changing their fates. Doderer himself was a complicated figure, an early member of the Nazi party who later broke with it, and that shadow is part of his story too.

    For the scientists of this quarter, these stairs were simply the daily commute. Physicists, doctors and students climbed them on their way between the institutes and the hospital. So do the same: climb to the top, and turn left into the Boltzmanngasse, a street named after a physicist. The plain building at number 3 changed what we know about the atom.

  8. 8. The Radium Institute, Boltzmanngasse 3

    Boltzmanngasse 3, 1090 Wien, Austria

    Find the solid building at Boltzmanngasse 3, with its rows of tall windows and its institute sign by the door. It looks like any university building, but in 1910 it opened as the Institute for Radium Research, one of the very first places in the world built entirely to study radioactivity.

    Austria had a secret advantage. The mines of Saint Joachimsthal in Bohemia, then part of the Habsburg Empire, produced uranium ore, and it was from the waste of those mines that Marie and Pierre Curie had extracted their radium. Vienna had the raw material for the most exciting physics of the age. A lawyer and patron, Karl Kupelwieser, paid for this building, and the physicist Stefan Meyer led it.

    Some of the most remarkable work here was done by women, at a time when that was rare. Marietta Blau developed a method of using photographic plates to record the tracks of particles, and in 1937, with Hertha Wambacher, she found star-shaped traces where cosmic rays had shattered atomic nuclei. Erwin Schrödinger later nominated her for the Nobel Prize.

    But in 1938, Blau, who was Jewish, had to flee. Her colleague Wambacher had joined the Nazi party, and stayed. The annexation emptied Viennese science of many of its brightest minds, and the city never fully recovered them. After the war another physicist from this institute, Berta Karlik, became the first woman to hold a full professorship at the University of Vienna.

    And the story continues. Today the building houses the Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information, founded by Anton Zeilinger, who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2022 for experiments with entangled photons. From radium to quantum teleportation, all behind one ordinary facade. Now walk to the end of the Boltzmanngasse and turn left on the Währinger Straße. A yellow palace behind railings holds an army of wax bodies.

  9. 9. Josephinum and the Anatomical Wax Models

    Währinger Straße 25, 1090 Wien, Austria

    Stop at the railings on the Währinger Straße and look across the courtyard at the long, calm, yellow and white palace with its columned centre. It looks like an aristocrat's home. In fact, it was built in 1785 as a school for army surgeons.

    Emperor Joseph the Second had a problem. His soldiers were treated by surgeons who had often been trained as barbers, men with saws and razors but little science. So he founded the Josephinum, the Medical-Surgical Academy, to give army surgeons an academic education. Its first director was his personal surgeon, Giovanni Alessandro Brambilla, and the building was designed by Isidor Canevale.

    Then Joseph needed teaching material, and dead bodies were hard to keep. On a visit to Florence he had admired the anatomical wax figures made there, so he ordered a whole collection from the Florentine workshop. More than a thousand models were made, and the story goes that they crossed the Alps carried by mules. Inside, in their original rosewood and glass cases, you can still see them: a reclining woman opened to show her organs, nerves like threads of silk, the lymphatic system traced in silver.

    They are beautiful and slightly unsettling, which is exactly what Joseph wanted. The Florentine work was supervised by the scientist Felice Fontana, and much of the modelling is credited to the sculptor Clemente Susini, whose hands could shape a vessel as fine as a hair. Students could study the body without the smell, the decay and the hurry of a dissection room, and a human figure could teach the same lesson for two centuries.

    Today the Josephinum belongs to the Medical University of Vienna and, after a long renovation, it tells the story of Viennese medicine, from these waxes to the great doctors of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Now cross into the Van-Swieten-Gasse and walk up towards the old hospital grounds. Behind the trees, a round tower is waiting, and it was built for the insane.

  10. 10. The Narrenturm

    Spitalgasse 2, Hof 13, 1090 Wien, Austria

    Walk around the trees until a strange round building comes into view: five storeys high, completely circular, with rows of small narrow windows like the slots of a dovecote. The Viennese nickname it the Gugelhupf, after the ring-shaped cake.

    This is the Narrenturm, the Fools' Tower, opened in 1784 by Joseph the Second beside his new General Hospital. It was one of the first buildings in Europe designed specifically for the mentally ill. Each floor is a ring of small cells, around 140 in all, opening onto a corridor around a central courtyard. The architect was very probably Isidor Canevale, the same man who designed the Josephinum you have just seen.

    By the standards of its time, it was progressive: the sick were taken out of prisons and poorhouses and given a building of their own. By our standards it was grim. Patients could be chained, and the design allowed a few guards to watch many people. The tower was used for psychiatric patients until 1869, when a proper asylum replaced it.

    Legends cling to it. Some say Joseph the Second, a man fascinated by Freemasonry and numbers, planned it according to a secret numerology. Others say that a lightning rod on top was meant to calm the patients with electricity. None of these stories has solid evidence behind it, but the circular shape still feels like a riddle.

    Since 1971 the tower has housed the pathological-anatomical collection, and since 2012 it has belonged to the Natural History Museum of Vienna. It holds tens of thousands of specimens, preserved organs, skeletons and wax casts of diseases, gathered by Viennese doctors over two centuries. It is not for the faint-hearted, but it is a library of human suffering, and without it, medicine could not have learned what it knows. Now walk south through the courtyards of the old hospital towards the Alser Straße and the great first courtyard.

  11. 11. Old General Hospital and Ignaz Semmelweis

    Alser Straße 4, 1090 Wien, Austria

    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.