ABSTRACT
At the end of the eighteenth century, about 250,000 people lived in Vienna. The General Hospital, which remains in service today, is a short walk from the center of Vienna and is now surrounded by gray office buildings and apartment houses. Nineteenth-century medical research and training focused on two hospital institutions: the clinic and the morgue. Each clinic was assigned one or more rooms in a gratis hospital, and each such room contained from twenty to one hundred beds. In 1784 when Vienna's General Hospital began admitting patients, it included various divisions, concerned primarily with caring for the sick, and clinics, intended to train medical professionals. Each clinic specialized in a particular area of medicine depending on the interest of the professor who was in charge. When it opened, the Viennese General Hospital had three clinics, one each for internal medicine, surgery, and obstetrics.
