Week in Vienna

This week I really enjoyed going to Vienna. It is a beautiful city with a lot of history and some fantastic music. The concert on Wednesday night was one of my favorite things that I have done so far. The string quartet played some great music from Mozart, Vivaldi, and a few others inside St. Anna’s, a really pretty, baroque church.  I really like classical music, but I had never heard it in concert until Wednesday night, so I really enjoyed it. Another thing that I really enjoyed was seeing the Impressionist art museum at the Albertina. The Albertina displayed some beautiful art from artists like Monet and a large collection of Picasso, one of my favorite artists. The Albertina also had an exhibit by Gottfried Helnwein who creates hyper-realistic art. The entire exhibit showcased some pretty creepy pieces of children and violence. Almost every picture was of the same girl about twelve years old, in a disturbing scene where she is either crying or covered in blood or with a very intense or sad look on her face. Despite the creepy nature of the paintings, they were all very pretty and intriguing, and the hyperrealist style was awesome. From 10 feet away each painting looked like a picture of this little girl, but as you got closer, you could see brushstrokes and little globs of paint and then it is possible to discern the image as a painting rather than a picture.

            The lecture walk with Dr. Schnabel through the streets of Vienna was quite a bit of fun. Partly from watching the puzzled reactions of people to the plague-doctor outfit that he was wearing, and partly from listening to Vienna’s medical history and how they thought about and dealt with the spread of diseases like the plague. It was interesting to learn that the people thought that breathing miasma coming up from the waste caused the plague. They were right about the cause of the disease which was the foul conditions that people lived in, but not about the mechanism by which people caught the plague. The plague is caused by bacteria that are transmitted from a bite from a flea. The flea first bites a rat, which were everywhere because of the filthy conditions, and then bites a human. The disease is not spread by miasmas like was believed back then. But, there is no way that they could have known about the transfer of bacteria because germ theory was not developed until much later. Some of the methods behind the prevention of catching the plague were pretty interesting. It seemed to be if it smelled bad, you could get sick, and if it smelled good, then you were safe. In order to combat the plaque people walked around with cloves in their mouths, which we did, and while cloves may smell nice, they are no fun to suck on. Another interesting thing that doctors did in those days was to don a “plague resistant” outfit. It consisted of long black robe covered in oil or fat to repel the miasma, and a beak-like mask to avoid breathing in any foul air. This outfit did not repel the bad air of course, because there is no such thing as miasma that causes plague. It probably repelled more people than it did the plague.

            The Freud House was really cool and has made me want to learn more about psychoanalysis. Sigmund Freud’s thoughts on the mind had come a long way from the ancient belief that a misplaced uterus caused hysteria. Freud’s ideas on the psyche were very interesting, and his attempts to split the mind into the Id, the ego and the super ego are an attempt to explain the mind, but who knows if it the mind will ever be fully understood. I do think his reduction of every mental disorder to some sort of sexual trauma was wrong. I am interested in Freud’s analysis of dreams though, because I’ve always wondered if dreams actually have any meaning or not. I had a fun week in Vienna and now I’m about to go explore Innsbruck!