History of Medicine/Medical Humanities

Aerial photograph from 1935 of the Art Nouveau extension building (erected in 1908) of Vienna General Hospital.   © Picture Library, Josephinum, Medical University of Vienna

Structures and Networks – Medicine und Medical Sciences in Vienna 1945–2004

Based on the results of the project completed in 2018, “Structures and Networks of Vien­nese Medicine 1848–1955 – scientific, politico-economic, social and cultural structures in the context of international change processes”, the new main topic of the inter­disciplinary working group will be medicine and science in Vienna from 1945 until 2004, i.e. until the public universities in Austria gained independence as legal entities under public law, a process which was accompanied by the formation of their own medical universities. The topic deals with the "structures and networks" within the defined period, taking account of the continuities and discontinuities in this research landscape in the context of inter­national change processes. There are currently only a few individual studies available and, hence, a huge increase in knowledge is to be expected.

By presenting the complex relationships between the individual players and their sur­roundings, as well as between the institutions of medicine and the associated professional policies and academies, regional, European and intercontinental networks will be traced back in a first step. A second step will involve identifying the implications of these net­works on re­search, education, career paths and medical practice. Finally, the inter­relationships with politics, international scientific relations, developments in research and teaching, law and ethics, as well as the influence of medicine on arts and culture are addressed.

Medical Humanities, describing the influence of medicine on culture and the arts and vice versa, will represent a further field of research of the working group. This discipline extends the view of medicine beyond its purely scientific nature, especially to­wards the culturally oriented approach to illness and death. Me­di­cal Humanities not only provides a research field for scientific participation of all five working groups of the Commission for the History and Philosophy of Sciences, but– in the medium to long-term – should be worthy of integration into medical research and teaching.