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Freud and medicine in Vienna*: Some scientific and medical sources of his thought

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 July 2009

George Rosen
George Rosen
Affiliation:
From the Department of the History of Science and Medicine, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, U.S.A.
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Synopsis

Freud as a medical student accepted the role of a man of science as defined by the medical milieu of Vienna, as well as the accompanying philosophy and methodology of clinical and scientific research. These forms became a part of his thought and into them he fitted his psychological discoveries as well as his view of himself. Without the medical Vienna in which he developed, Freud would not have been what he was.

Type
Research Article
Information
Psychological Medicine , Volume 2 , Issue 4 , November 1972 , pp. 332 - 344
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1972

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References

NOTES AND REFERENCES

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5 Hermann Nothnagel (1841–1905) was professor of medicine at Hamburg, Jena, and Vienna, and the leading clinician of his time. Neuropathology, chronic diseases, gastrointestinal disorders, and cardiac conditions were of major interest to him. He was an authority on angina pectoris, and it was from this disease that he died. Nothnagel was a clinical scientist to the very last, as shown by the notes found on his night table, undoubtedly written shortly before his death, recording ths signs and symptoms of his heart attack.

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15 Johannes Müller (1801–58) was professor in Bonn and Berlin. He was not only a physiologist but also a comparative anatomist, embryologist, and pathologist. See Virchow, R. (1858). Johannes Müller. August Hirschwald: BerlinGoogle Scholar. Müller, Martin (1926). Ueber die philosophischen Anschauungen des Naturforschers Johannes Müller. Archiv, für Geschichte der Medizin und Naturwissenschaften, 18, 130–150, 209–234, 328–350.Google Scholar

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44 Ibid., pp. 107, 146.

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49 Electrodiagnosis and therapy were not peculiar to Nothnagel; they were part of the medical scene of the period, having been introduced in Paris and Berlin in the 1850s, and in Vienna a decade later. See Lesky, , op. cit., pp. 389–393.Google Scholar

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56 Heinrich Obersteiner (1847–1922), psychiatrist and neurologist, professor at Vienna, had undertaken research on the nervous system in Brücke's laboratory while still a student. He established the first neurological institute in 1882, with research centring chiefly on neuroanatomy and pathology. A lecture on cerebral anatomy which Freud delivered on 12 May 1885 was intended, as he wrote to his fiancée, ‘actually only for one person, Professor Obersteiner’ (Freud, , Briefe, p. 139)Google Scholar. The latter helped Freud that year to obtain a position as locum tenens for three weeks in the Heilanstalt in Oberdöbling, a private mental hospital run by Obersteiner's father together with Max Leidesdorf, professor of psychiatry at Vienna.

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