Academic relationships between Hungarian professors and the Second Vienna Medical School

SummaryThis article discusses the impact of the ‘second’ Vienna Medical School, hallmarked by Karl Rokitansky, Joseph Skoda and Ferdinand Hebra, on the study and practice of medicine in Hungary. Six medical doctors’ lives and achievements are outlined, who formed a bridge between Vienna and Budapest through their studies and work. Four of them returned to Hungary and promoted the cause of medicine and medical education there. Lajos Arányi (1812–1877) founded in 1844 the Institute of Pathology at the University of Pest. János Balassa (1814–1868) took the Chair of the Surgical Department. Ignaz Philip Semmelweis (1818–1865), the ‘Saviour of Mothers’, received a position at the Department of Obstetrics and Gynaecology in Vienna in 1846. Gustav Scheuthauer (1832–1894) became Arányi’s successor. Each of them continued to keep contact with their tutors in Vienna, especially with Karl Rokitansky, and followed the clinicopathological conception pioneered by the Vienna Medical School regarding diagnostics, treatment and prevention of diseases. Two physicians remained in Vienna: Mór Kaposi (1837–1902), who became known worldwide posthumously due to the connection between Kaposi’s sarcoma and AIDS, was the director of the Department of Dermatology of the Vienna University in 1878. Salomon Stricker (1837–1898) undertook the leadership of the Department of General and Experimental Pathology in 1872.

Anatomy for All: Medical Knowledge on the Fairground inFin-de-SiècleVienna

Recent scholarship on the history of science and medicine has begun to consider the diversity of sites, markets, and audiences for scientific knowledge. This article investigates a single publicly accessible location: Vienna's Prater park. At a time when the Second Vienna Medical School led the world in anatomy and pathology, two case studies demonstrate how knowledge about human anatomy entered thefin-de-siècleViennese public sphere in a noninstitutional setting. Josef Hyrtl, an anatomist, and Hermann Präuscher, a showman, employed targeted marketing strategies for their anatomical preparations to facilitate the circulation of anatomical knowledge among the socially diverse audiences that congregated on the fairground. Examining how anatomy was visualized and discursively constructed, alongside questions of site, accessibility, and audience response, sheds light on a pivotal historical moment when the meaning of the human body was undergoing significant transformation in Austrian society.

Emanuel Edward Klein—The Father of British Microbiology and the Case of the Animal Vivisection Controversy of 1875

The new Appendix A of the European Convention for the Protection of Vertebrate Animals Used for Experimental and Other Scientific Purposes, which gives guidelines for accommodation and care of animals and was approved on June 15, 2006, was the main reason the authors decided to investigate the origins of the regulations of animal experiments. Although one might assume that the regulation had its origin in the United Nations conventions, the truth is that its origins are a hundred years old. The authors present a case of the nineteenth-century vivisection controversy brought about by the publication of the Handbook for the Physiological Laboratory in 1873, in which John Burdon-Sanderson, Emanuel Edward Klein, Michael Foster, and Thomas Lauder Brunton described a series of vivisection experiments they performed on animals for research purposes. It was the first case of vivisection to be examined, processed, and condemned for inhuman behavior toward animals before an official body, leading to enactment of the Cruelty to Animals Act in 1876. The case reveals a specific ethos of science in the second half of the nineteenth century, which was characterized by a deep commitment of scientists to the scientific enterprise and their strong belief that science could solve social problems, combined with an overt insensitivity to the suffering of experimental animals. The central figure in the case was Emanuel Edward Klein, a disciple of the Central European medical tradition (Vienna Medical School) and a direct follower of the experimental school of Brücke, Stricker, Magendie, and Bernard. Because of his undisguised attitudes and opinions on the use of vivisection, Klein became a paradigm of the new scientific identity, strongly influencing the stereotypic image of a scientist, and polarizing the public opinion on vivisection in England in the nineteenth century and for some considerable time afterward.