Following a weekend of overnight trains and little to no quality sleep, waking up for a 6a.m. train was not the first thing I wanted to do. Nevertheless, it was time for our program to leave Bonn and head to Vienna, so there was some excitement hidden underneath my exhaustion. The train ride was 8 hours though, giving me plenty of time to nap in preparation for our highly informational and eventful week.
We arrived in Vienna around 3 in the afternoon, caught the subway to our hotel, checked in, and then headed to the center of town to meet Dr. Wasser’s colleague Dr. Schnabel (SPOILER: it was Dr. Wasser dressed as a plague doctor). Doctor Schnabel took us on a walking tour of Vienna, showing us some significant medical history sites throughout the city and “treating” us to ensure we wouldn’t catch the plague. Some of our medications consisted of cloves, rosemary, thyme, urine (a yellow soda), vinegar of the four robbers, and peach gummies, the latter being everyone’s favorite. After our tour we had a class dinner at the Gulasch Museum, which is not actually a museum. It was such an amazing way to end the night, with good company and amazing food. Some people were brave enough to order the intriguing horse gulasch, but I settled for beef gulasch and a bite of someone else’s. For dessert Rachel, Jessika and I each ordered something different and shared but my favorite was the chocolate gulasch, which was small squares of cake in a dark chocolate “stew”.
On Tuesday we walked from the hotel to the Josephinum, which used to serve as the military training hospital. Today it houses the wax anatomical models commissioned for educational purposes by Joseph II in the late 18th century. We spent much of the morning walking through the several rooms that held the wax models, discussing the impressive accuracy and small misconceptions considering the time of production. Our focus on wax models of the human body then turned to mummified bodies as we toured St. Michael’s Crypt. The church itself was beautiful, but what lied underneath was quite eerie. I don’t think I knew what to expect when I was told we were touring a crypt. Maybe immaculate caskets hold the remains of some saint? That was definitely not what I saw when we walked down the steps below the church. The crypt had been built after the church because the location of the former cemetery was very close to the center of town and their unsophisticated burial practices meant that heavy rains would uncover the decaying bodies, making the town smell so awful even the Joseph II complained. My first thought was that it was very cold, in a haunting way. Our guide then directed us into one of the larger crypt rooms, which he explained would’ve been used for the commoners as the smaller rooms were made for individual wealthy families. Many of the caskets had been removed so as to make walking room for visitors, but there were many more than I had initially expected. Furthermore, some of them were open, containing the mummified remains of people who had died in the late 1700’s. As our guide explained, the mummification was not by choice, but was the result of the climate conditions in the crypt. From there we went into one of the smaller rooms holding metal coffins, instead of wooden ones, which indicated it was the crypt of a wealthy family. After that the crypt seemed to go on forever, but that was all we were able to see and besides, we were getting hungry so we left and got kasekrainers (cheese filled hotdogs) for lunch. We also tried out the cake at Café Demel, which is supposedly famous for its cakes but I thought they were overrated and overpriced. Their hot chocolate was pretty good though, tasting less like your typical hot chocolate and more like a melted chocolate bar - if that even makes sense. I then headed back to the hotel to get ready for the classical concert we would be attending that night. When we all met back up as a group we walked to this building that looked unsuspecting from the outside, but then we walked in to see an immaculately decorated church interior. The old style pews were just as uncomfortable as Henning said they would be but the concert, consisting of Beethoven and Mozart, was incredible.
The human body was our focus yet again on Wednesday as we went to the Narrenturm, a former psychiatric hospital, which holds a collection of anatomical pathology. There were preserved anatomical pieces as well as wax models made from casts and painted by an artist sitting at the ill patient’s bedside. We walked in a full circle around the hospital, which was built in a round formation due to its purpose as a madhouse, inspecting the depictions of many diseases. One of the most fascinating was a model of a child with what is sometimes called fish scales disease, where one’s dead skin cells do not shed as is normal, causing them to have issues with sweating, overheating, and infection. What was interesting about this model was that it was the actual skin of a young girl, and while I appreciate the contribution to science, I don’t know that I agree with it. During our break after the Narrenturm some of the girls and I went to Belvedere Palace and then got kasekrainers again. We then met back up with the class and went to the National History Museum where we got to see some of their top pieces such as the Venus of Willendorf - a small figurine from paleolithic times that was most likely used in fertility rituals or something of the sort. Having studied this piece in high school through Academic Decathlon I thought it was very interesting to see, especially since I knew it was going to be small but not as small as it actually is in person. The rest of the afternoon was spent at a pub watching the Germany vs South Korea soccer game. Henning was very into the game (as would be expected) making all of us even more invested. Unfortunately, Germany lost and was out of the World Cup, but we continued our party by going and dancing to some serious throwback songs.
Our last day in Vienna was spent at the Freud House, a museum set up in the Freud family’s apartment, getting to learn more about Freud as a person and to see the very room in which he psychoanalyzed his patients before moving to London during the war. After touring the apartment Dr. Wasser gave a lecture in one of the downstairs rooms, teaching us more about the id, ego, and superego, and Freud’s underlying ideas of the importance of sex and death. We finished our time together as a class by eating at a Pakistani buffet (a very interesting experience to say the least) and then I grabbed my bags and headed out for my very last travel weekend.
Sarah Bohac
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