This revolutionary activity challenged feudal lords and royalty,
establishing greater democratic rights for the lower classes, even
witnessing the introduction of The Communist Manifesto that same year. In
particular, the revolutions in the German states and the Austrian Empire
had significant repercussions in medicine and academia, much like
American college campuses in the 1960s. The stodgy, outdated lords of
medicine held off revolutionary-minded fledglings in Vienna; the battle of
the “new versus the old, the intellectually liberal versus the conservative,
the true scientific understanding of disease versus the fuzzy theoretics of
the old medicine” played out at the University of Vienna’s school of
medicine. The chief agitator was the Bohemian Carl von Rokitansky
(1804–1878).
Rokitansky grasped the significance of Morgagni and his French
devotees, digging deeper and searching indefatigably for the root causes of
disease and death. The more he studied disease, the more profound was his
understanding of function. If Morgagni is the father of anatomic pathology
and medical diagnosis, then Rokitansky is the man who literally built the
house of pathology.
The Allgemeines Krankenhaus (or General Hospital) now exists as the
University of Vienna undergraduate campus, but the expansive courtyards
and stately buildings remain intact, even if they are filled with Bohemian
Austrian students and not suffering patients. In the northwest portion of
the campus stands the Center for Brain Research, an imposing three-story
stone building on Spitalgasse, guarded by a brick and steel barrier and
topped by a grouping of Greco-Roman figures and the Austrian double
eagle shield. Below the figures is a gold-embossed inscription in Latin that
is the only indication that this building used to serve a completely
different function. Fifty feet overhead, one can read INDAGANDIS SEDIBUS ET
CAUSIS MORBORUM, an obvious nod to Morgagni’s revolutionary book,
meaning “Investigation of the seats and causes of disease.” This was once
Rokitansky’s Pathological Institute, a concert hall of medicine, where he
demonstrated over 30,000 autopsies in his long career.
The structure and organization of the institute, where every single
patient who died at the general hospital was examined postmortem, helped
relocate European medical leadership to Vienna. A collection of
physicians came together in Vienna to birth the specialties of pathology,
dermatology, psychiatry, ophthalmology, and surgery, and Rokitansky’s
marcin
(Marcin)
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