Dissection, Discipline and Urban Transformation: Anatomy in Late Imperial Vienna

Vienna in the last decades of the Habsburg rule is generally imagined as home to a leisurely café culture and a lively art scene, but also as a polyglot time bomb of class and ethnic conflict. For historians of medicine, the city was a leading educational center, offering students and physicians unparalleled access to the bodies of patients, living and dead. How and why should we try to put these two views together? Following scholars who are increasingly taking cities seriously as settings that mould the production of scientific knowledge, I treat the practice of anatomy as informed, not just by international struggles over disciplinary priorities, but also by local politics, society and geography. I hope to show how such an approach benefits both urban history and history of science. While my book project studies the hundred years between the revolution of 1848 and the end of the Second World War, this talk will focus on the period between 1848 and 1914.

Tatjana Buklijas was trained as a physician in her native Croatia before completing a PhD in history and philosophy of science at the University of Cambridge, UK (2005). She then worked at Cambridge and, since 2008, at the Liggins Institute, University of Auckland, New Zealand. Tatjana has published widely on histories of anatomy; science and medicine in the Habsburg Empire, in particular on science and nationalism and science and empire; evolution; and heredity and human development, including a virtual exhibition Making Visible Embryos.