A Week in Freud's City

I've always wanted to come to Vienna, so I knew that I would enjoy five days in such a historically relevant city. I knew only that Freud, Mozart, and Beethoven lived here at certain points in their lives and not much more. I had no idea there was such a history filled with medically relevant people surrounding the past of the city. I knew a little about Roman influence in Germanic parts of Europe, but I didn't know that Roman soldiers had begun the city as a sort of outpost on the Danube with about 5-6 thousand soldiers guarding the eastern border of the empire.

Personally, I love learning the evolution of a city such as this when so many powers in Europe have influenced its growth over the centuries until now. It's so interesting for me to see the different models of the city plan from the different centuries as walls were created, torn down to make room, and attacked by Turks and Ottomans.

From today, hearing about the differences between the Viennese and American process of getting into and through medical school intrigued me. This system that seems to be in place in most of Austria and Germany, based almost purely on one thing for entry, appeals to me for its focus on aptitude. The American process of getting into medical school has so many factors put into the decision on whether or not you can study medicine for a higher degree. For me, while this process seems to have the more efficient way of determining whether a person is more well rounded in their life and studies, it also seems to be overwhelming in the numbers of things that have to be accomplished when considering if you can even try to get to medical school. I guess, this could be a good way to weed out the people that can't handle the stress, but I think it also may get rid of the people who are very good at medicine but nothing else. I don't claim to be an expert by any means, but I do think that there is room for improvement in the medical schooling process and admission in the United States by comparison to what other nations have going on.

Because I have such an interest in the field of infectious diseases, the pathology museums that we visited, having human and wax models of ideal and sickly patients, severely intrigued me. I feel that I have been exposed to a fair amount of what kinds of diseases can be contracted in this world from classes, such as Great Diseases of the World, Medical Entomology, Animal Nutrition, etc. These classes along with what we were able to witness this last week from behind glass on wax specimens have helped to confirm my wants to pursue the infectious disease part of the medical field. While this part of medicine in the United States deals largely with AIDS patients, the developing world suffers much from disease that needs doctors of this kind to diagnose and treat people. Seeing how people in what is now the developed world began to find solutions to disease of such kind hundreds of years ago shows how far behind so much of the world is, and I can't help but think how "easy" it would be to apply what we have to offer to people groups that have no way of dealing with such disease, practically.